THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


IN  MEMORY  OF 
MRS.  VIRGINIA  B.  SPORER 


PHILOSOPHIES  ANCIENT  AND  MODERN 


EPICURUS 


RELIGIONS:   ANCIENT  AND   MODERN 

Animism.    By  EDWARD  CLODD,  author  of  The  Story  of  Creation. 
Pantheism.     By  JAMES  ALLANSON  PICTON,  author  of  The  Religion  of  the 

Universe. 
The  Religions  of  Ancient  China.    By  Professor  GILES,  LL.  D. ,  Professor 

of  Chinese  in  the  University  of  Cambridge. 
The  Religion  Of  Ancient  Greece.     By  JANE  HARRISON,  Lecturer  at 

Newnham  College,  Cambridge,  author  of  Prolegomena  to  Study  of  Greek 

Religion. 
Islam.    By  the  Rt,  Hon.  AMEER  ALI  SYED,  of  the  Judicial  Committee  of  His 

Majesty's  Privy  Council,  author  of  The  Spirit  of  Islam  and  Ethics  of  Islam. 
Magic  and  Fetishism.     By  Dr.  A.  C.  H ADDON,  F.R.S.,  Lecturer  on 

Ethnology  at  Cambridge  University. 
The  Religion  of  Ancient  Egypt.    By  Professor  W.  M.  FLINDERS  PETKIE, 

F.R.S. 
The  Religion  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria.    By  THEOPHILUS  G.  PINCHES, 

late  of  the  British  Museum. 
Early  Buddhism.    By  Professor  RHYS  DAVIDS,  LL.D.,  late  Secretary  of 

The  Royal  Asiatic  Society. 
Hinduism.    By  Dr.  L.  D.  BARNETT,  of  the  Department  of  Oriental  Printed 

Books  and  MSS.,  British  Museum. 
Scandinavian  Religion.    By  WILLIAM  A.  CRAIGIE,  Joint  Editor  of  the 

Oxford  English  Dictionary. 
Celtic  Religion.    By  Professor  ANWYL,  Professor  of  Welsh  at  University 

College,  Aberystwyth. 
The  Mythology  of  Ancient  Britain  and  Ireland.     By  CHARLES 

SQUIKE,  author  of  The  Mythology  of  the  British  Islands. 

Judaism.  By  ISRAEL  ABRAHAMS,  Lecturer  in  Talmudic  Literature  in  Cam- 
bridge University,  author  of  Jewish  Life  in  the  Middle  Ages. 

The  Religion  of  Ancient  Rome.    By  CYRIL  BAILEY,  M.A. 

Shinto,  The  Ancient  Religion  of  Japan.    By  w.  G.  ASTON,  c.  M.  G. 

The  Religion  of  Ancient  Mexico  and  Peru.    By  LEWIS  SPENCE,  M.A. 

Early  Christianity.    By  S.  B.  BLACK,  Professor  at  M'Gill  University. 

The  Psychological  Origin  and  Nature  of  Religion.  By  Professor 
J.  H.  LEUBA. 

The  Religion  of  Ancient  Palestine.    By  STANLEY  A.  COOK. 

ManiCheeism.    By  F.  C.  CONYBEARE.    (Shortly.) 

PHILOSOPHIES 

Early  Greek  Philosophy.    By  A.  W.  BENN,  author  of  The  Philosophy  of 

Greece,  Rationalism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century. 
Stoicism.     By  Professor  ST.  GEOROE  STOCK,  author  of  Deductive  Logic, 

editor  of  the  Apology  of  Plato,  etc. 
Plato.     By  Professor  A.  E.  TAYLOR,  St.  Andrews  University,  author  of 

The  Problem  of  Conduct. 
Scholasticism.    By  Father  RICKABY,  S.  J. 
Hobbes.    By  Professor  A.  E.  TAYLOR. 
Locke.    By  Professor  ALEXANDER,  of  Owens  College. 
Comte  and  Mill.    By  T.  WHITTAKER,  author  of  The  Neoplatonists  Apollo- 

nius  ofTyana  and  other  Essays. 
Herbert   Spencer.     By  W.   H.  HUDSON,  author  of  An  Introduction  to 

Spencer's  Philosophy. 
Schopenhauer.    By  T.  WHITTAKER. 

Berkeley.    By  Professor  CAMPBELL  FRASER,  D.C.L.,  LL.D. 
Swedenborg.    By  Dr.  SEWALL.    (Immediately.) 
Lucretius  and  the  Atomists.    By  EDWARD  CLODD. 
Nietzsche :  His  Life  and  Works.    By  ANTHONY  M.  LUDOVICI. 


EPICURUS 


By 

A.    E.    TAYLOR 


NEW  YORK 
DODGE    PUBLISHING   COMPANY 

2I4-22O    EAST    23RD    STREET 


Printed  in  Great  Britain  by 

T.  and  A.  CONSTABLE,  Printers  to  His  Majesty 

at  the  University  Press,  Edinburgh 


FOREWORD 

THIS  little  volume  is,  as  its  title  proclaims,  a  brief 
study  of  the  thought  and  temperament  of  a  remarkable 
man,  not  the  history  of  a  scientific  school.  The  band 
of  comrades  who  gathered  round  Epicurus  in  his 
Garden  were  held  together  not  so  much  by  a  common 
intellectual  interest  in  the  pursuit  of  truth  as  by  the 
ties  of  personal  affection  among  themselves  and  per- 
sonal devotion  to  a  master  whom  they  regarded  more 
as  a  Redeemer  from  the  ills  of  life  than  as  a  mere 
thinker.  That  the  feelings  of  the  Epicurean  society 
of  a  later  date  were  of  the  same  kind  is  amply  proved 
by  the  tone  of  the  poem  of  Lucretius.  Atomism  as 
a  scientific  hypothesis  owes  nothing  to  Epicurus  or  to 
any  of  his  followers ;  he  found  it  already  in  existence, 
and  every  innovation  which  he  made  upon  its  existing 
form  was,  from  the  scientific  point  of  view,  a  change 
for  the  worse.  As  a  man  of  science,  his  place  is  with 
the  circle-squarers  and  the  earth-flatteners.  This, 
together  with  the  fact  that  a  volume  on  ancient 
Atomism  is  announced  to  appear  in  due  time  in  the 
present  series,  will  explain  why  I  have  said  no  more 
about  the  really  scientific  Atomism  of  the  fifth 
century  B.C.  than  was  absolutely  necessary  to  place 
the  indifference  of  Epicurus  and  his  followers  to 
science  in  the  proper  light.  For  similar  reasons  I 

2042143 


EPICURUS 

have  avoided  dealing  with  Lucretius,  the  one  man 
of  genius  in  the  Epicurean  following,  except  where 
it  has  been  necessary  to  cite  him  as  a  mere  witness  to 
the  Epicurean  tradition.  The  one  point  of  interest 
to  the  student  of  the  history  of  physical  theories 
which  has,  as  I  hope,  been  made  clearer  than  is  usual 
in  works  on  ancient  Atomism  is  that  the  Epicurean 
Physics  are  throughout  the  result  of  an  unhappy 
attempt,  which  no  clear-headed  thinker  would  ever 
have  undertaken,  to  fuse  together  the  radically  in- 
compatible doctrines  of  Democritus  and  Aristotle. 
If  the  establishment  of  this  important  point  has  made 
my  second  chapter  into  something  like  the  exposure 
of  a  charlatan,  the  fault  is  not  mine.  For  a  different 
reason  I  have  said  little  as  to  the  few  facts  definitely 
known  about  the  illustrious  obscurities  of  the  Epi- 
curean succession.  I  trust  some  compensation  may 
be  found  in  the  chapter  on  the  anti-Epicurean  polemic 
carried  on  by  the  Platonic  Academy. 

The  volume  has  been  throughout  written  from  the 
original  sources  with  little  use  of  any  modern  works 
on  Epicurus,  except,  of  course,  Usener's  invaluable 
collection  of  his  extant  writings  and  fragments,  and 
Koerte's  compilation  of  the  fragments  of  Metrodorus. 
I  trust  that  my  treatment  in  this  way  may  have 
gained  in  freshness  something  of  what  it  has,  no 
doubt,  lost  in  erudition. 

A.  E.  TAYLOR. 
ST.  ANDREWS.    July  1910. 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

i.  THE  LIFE  OF  EPICURUS 1 

n.  THE  NATURE  OF  REALITY 35 

in.  THE  SALVATION  OF  MAN 80 

iv.  EPICURUS  AND  HIS  CRITICS          ....  97 

APPENDIX — SELECT    APOPHTHEGMS    FROM    EPI- 
CURUS AND  METRODORUS         ....  115 

A  CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE  USEFUL  TO  THE  READER 

OF  THIS  BOOK 119 

A    SHORT    LIST    OF    BOOKS    USEFUL    TO    THE 

ENGLISH  STUDENT  OF  EPICURUS  121 


vii 


EPICUEUS 

CHAPTER    I 

THE  LIFE  OF  EPICURUS 

WHEN  we  turn  from  Plato  and  Aristotle,  the  great 
constructive  thinkers  of  the  fourth  century  before 
Christ,  to  the  study  of  the  new  sects  or  schools, — that 
of  Epicurus  was,  in  date  of  foundation,  slightly  older 
than  the  others, — which  came  into  being  early  in  the 
third  century,  under  the  successors  of  Alexander,  we 
feel  at  first  as  if  we  had  passed  into  a  new  moral 
atmosphere. 

Philosophy  seems  to  have  dwindled  from  the 
magnificent  attempt  to  arrive  at  scientific  knowledge 
of  God,  man,  and  nature  into  a  mere  theory  of  conduct; 
and,  in  the  theory  of  conduct  itself,  the  old  conception 
of  the  individual  man  as  essentially  a  member  of  a 
community  freely  banded  together  to  live  the  'good 
life,'  in  virtue  of  which  Plato  and  Aristotle  could  treat 
what  we  call  '  ethics '  as  a  mere  part  of  the  wider  study 
of  society,  its  aims  and  institutions  (Politics),  to  have 
A  I 


EPICURUS 

given  place  to  a  purely  individualistic  doctrine  of 
morals  which  has  lost  the  sense  of  the  inseparable  union 
of  the  civilised  man  with  the  civilised  society.  So 
keenly  has  this  difference  of  tone  been  felt  that  writers 
on  philosophy  have  almost  always  adopted  the  death 
of  Aristotle  as  one  of  those  historical  land-marks 
which  indicate  the  ending  of  an  old  era,  and  the 
beginning  of  a  new,  like  the  English  Revolution  of 
1688  or  the  French  Revolution  of  1789.  The  cause 
of  so  great  a  change  has  been  variously  sought  in  the 
special  conditions  of  life  in  the  third  century.  Under 
the  hard  pressure  of  the  Macedonian  dynasts,  it  has 
been  said,  Philosophy  naturally  became  identical  with 
the  theory  of  conduct,  because,  in  such  untoward  times, 
the  effort  to  understand  the  world  had  to  be  abandoned 
for  the  task  of  making  life  bearable.  The  theory  of 
statesmanship  shrank  into  a  mere  doctrine  of  morals 
because  with  the  battle  of  Chaeronea  the  free  life  of 
the  independent  city-states  came  once  for  all  to  an 
end.  Others,  again,  have  seen  the  key  to  the 
developments  of  Philosophy  in  the  third  century  in 
a  return  of  Greek  thought  from  the  'idealism'  of 
Plato  and  Aristotle  into  the  materialism,  which,  as 
is  alleged,  was  natural  to  it.  There  is  an  element 
of  truth  in  these  views,  but  they  are  none  the  less, 
as  they  stand,  thoroughly  unhistorical. 

It  is  true,  to  be  sure,  that  under  the  Macedonian 
rulers  the  ordinary  man  was  cut  loose  from  the  im- 
mediate participation  in  public  affairs  of  moment 

2 


THE   LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

which  had  been  characteristic  of  the  life  of  the 
sovereign  city-state,  and  that  individualism  in  ethics 
is  the  natural  counterpart  of  cosmopolitanism  in  public 
life.  It  is  also  true  that  both  the  Epicurean  and  the 
Stoic  systems  regarded  the  theory  of  the  chief  good 
for  man  and  the  right  rule  of  life  as  the  culminating 
achievement  of  Philosophy,  and  that  both  tended,  in 
their  doctrine  of  nature,  to  revert  to  views  which  are 
curiously  reactionary  as  compared  with  those  of  Plato 
and  Aristotle.  But  it  is  false  to  suppose  that  the 
death  of  Aristotle  or  the  appearance  of  Epicurus  as  a 
teacher  really  marks  any  solution  of  historical 
continuity.  From  the  time  of  Pythagoras  at  least 
Philosophy  had  always  been  to  the  Greek  mind  what 
personal  religion  is  to  ourselves,  a  '  way  of  life,'  that 
is  a  means  to  the  salvation  of  the  soul,  and  this 
conception  is  no  less  prominent  in  Plato  and  Aristotle, 
when  they  are  rightly  read,  than  in  Epicurus  and 
Zeno.  And,  with  regard  to  the  alleged  effects  on 
Philosophy  of  the  disappearance  of  the  old  life  of  the 
free  city-state,  it  is  important  to  recollect  that  Aristotle 
composed  his  Politics  under  the  Macedonian  regime, 
and  that  the  Athens  of  Pericles  had  ceased  to  exist, 
except  as  a  mere  shadow  of  its  former  past,  before 
Plato  wrote  the  Republic.  If  any  single  date  can  be 
taken  as  signalising  the  end  of  the  old  order,  it  should 
rather  be  that  of  the  surrender  of  Athens  to  Lysander, 
or  even  that  of  the  defeat  of  Nicias  before  Syracuse, 
than  that  of  the  collapse  of  the  anti-Macedonian  agita- 

3 


EPICURUS 

tion  of  Demosthenes  and  Hypereides  on  the  field  of 
Chaeronea.1 

Similarly  the  cosmopolitanism  and  individualism 
of  the  Epicurean  and  Stoic  ethics  is  no  new  de- 
parture, nor  even  a  reaction  to  the  attitude  of  the 
'  Sophists '  of  the  fifth  century,  but  a  direct  continuance 
of  traditions  which  had  never  died  out.  Epicurus  is 
directly  connected  by  a  series  of  discernible  though 
little  known  predecessors  with  Democritus,  just  as 
Zeno  is  with  Antisthenes  and  Diogenes.  Nor  is  it  true 
that  the  third  century  was  a  period  of  intellectual 
stagnation.  It  is  the  age  of  the  foundation  of  the 
great  Museum  and  Library  at  Alexandria,  of  the 
development  of  literary  criticism  into  a  craft,  of  the 
creation  of  the  organised  and  systematic  study  of 
history  and  chronology,  and  the  compilation  of  full 
and  exact  observations  of  natural  history  in  the  widest 
sense  of  the  term.  Above  all,  it  is  the  time  to  which 
belong  the  greatest  of  the  Greek  mathematicians,  and 
astronomers,  Eudoxus,  Euclid,  Eratosthenes,  Aris- 
tarchus  of  Samos,  Apollonius  of  Perga,  Archimedes. 

The  notion  that  a  century  so  full  of  original  scientific 
work  was  one  of  intellectual  sterility  is  probably  due 

1  The  conception  of  Chaeronea  as  par  excellence  the  '  bad 
victory,  fatal  to  liberty '  comes  in  the  end  from  Plutarch  to 
whom  it  was  natural  as  a  Boeotian.  Boeotia's  hour  of  glory, — 
the  brief  and  brilliant  career  of  Epameinondas, — belonged  to 
the  fourth  century,  and  her  political  importance  ceased  for 
ever  with  the  annihilation  of  the  '  sacred  band  '  at  Chaeronea. 
For  Greece  at  large  the  Macedonian  victory  had  much  less 
significance. 

4 


to  a  simple  historical  accident.  For  the  most  part  the 
writings  of  the  successors  of  Plato  and  Aristotle,  as 
well  as  those  of  the  early  Stoics,  happen  not  to  have 
been  preserved  to  us.  Hence  we  readily  tend  to 
forget  that  the  scientific  and  philosophical  work  of 
the  Academy  and  Lyceum  was  vigorously  propagated 
all  through  the  period  in  which  the  new  schools  were 
seeking  to  establish  themselves,  and  that  the  Stoics, 
the  most  important  of  the  new  sects,  were  not  merely 
keenly  interested  in  'Physics,' but  were  also  devoted 
to  minute  researches  into  Formal  Logic,  much  of  which, 
in  the  shape  in  which  the  Middle  Ages  have  handed 
it  down  to  us,  has  been  inherited  directly  from  them. 
Hence  we  come  to  look  on  the  indifference  to  logic 
and  scientific  Physics  which  was  characteristic  of  the 
temperament  of  Epicurus  as  if  it  was  a  universal 
feature  of  'Post-Aristotelian'  thought,  and  falsely 
ascribe  to  the  age  what  is  really  true  of  the  man.  Of 
the  age  it  would  be  much  more  true  to  say  that  it  was 
one  of  devotion  to  the  advancement  of  special  sciences 
rather  than  to  the  elaboration  of  fresh  general  points 
of  view  in  Philosophy.  In  this  respect  it  is  closely 
parallel  with  the  middle  of  our  own  nineteenth 
century,  Avhen  the  interest  in  philosophical  speculation 
which  had  culminated  in  the  '  absolute  Philosophy '  of 
Hegel  gave  place  to  absorption  in  the  empirical  study 
of  Nature  and  History. 

Having  said  so  much  to  guard  ourselves  against  a 
common  misunderstanding  we  may  proceed  to  consider 

5 


EPICURUS 

what  is  known  of  the  personal  life  and  habits  of 
Epicurus.  Our  chief  source  of  information  is  the  so- 
called  Life  of  Epicurus  which  forms  the  last  section  of 
the  ill-digested  scrap-book  known  as  the  Lives  of  the 
Philosophers  by  Laertius  Diogenes.1  (Of  additional 
matter  from  other  sources  we  have  little  beyond  one 
or  two  unimportant  letters  of  Epicurus  himself  which 
have  been  preserved,  along  with  much  later  Epicurean 
materials,  under  the  lava  which  overwhelmed  the  city 
of  Herculaneum).  In  its  present  form  the  work  of 
Diogenes  only  dates  from  the  middle  of  the  third 
century  A.D.,  and,  indeed,  hardly  deserves  to  be  called 
a  '  work '  at  all,  since  it  can  be  shown  to  contain  notes 
which  must  have  been  made  by  generations  of  succes- 
sive readers,  and  seems  never  to  have  been  subjected 
to  the  final  revision  of  a  single  editor.  Its  value,  for 
us,  depends  on  the  fact  that  it  is  largely  made  up  of 
notices  drawn  from  much  more  ancient  authorities 
who  are  often  quoted  by  name.  This  is  particularly 
the  case  with  the  Life  of  Epicurus  which  is,  in  the 
main,  drawn  from  the  statements  of  Epicurus  himself, 
his  intimate  friends,  and  his  contemporary  opponents, 

1  The  view  of  Cobet  followed  in  my  Plato  in  the  present 
series,  that  '  Laertius  Diogenes '  means  Diogenes  of  Laerte,  is 
mistaken.  The  double  name  is  a  mere  instance  of  the  fashion, 
current  among  the  Greek-speaking  citizens  of  the  Roman 
Empire,  in  the  third  century  A.D.,  of  copying  the  Roman 
practice,  according  to  which  a  man  had,  besides  his  personal 
name  (praenomen),  a  second  name  (nomen)  indicating  his  gens 
or  clan,  e.g.  Gnaeus  Pompeius,  Titus  Livius,  Gains  Manlius, 
Marcus  Antonius. 


THE   LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

and  may  thus  be  taken  as,  on  the  whole,  a  fair  repre- 
sentation of  what  was  known  or  inferred  about  him 
by  the  Alexandrian  writers  of  'Successions,'  or  Hand- 
books to  the  history  of  Philosophy,  the  earliest  of 
whom  date  from  the  latter  part  of  the  third  century 
B.C.  For  this  reason,  and  for  the  sake  of  giving  the 
reader  a  specimen  of  the  biographical  material  avail- 
able in  the  study  of  ancient  Philosophy  in  a  specially 
favourable  case,  I  proceed  to  give  a  complete  rendering 
of  the  strictly  biographical  part  of  Diogenes'  account 
of  Epicurus  from  the  text  of  Usener. 

'  Epicurus,  an  Athenian,  son  of  Neocles  and  Chaeres- 
trata,  of  the  township  of  Gargettus,  and  of  the 
house  of  the  Philaidae,1  according  to  Metrodorus  in  his 
work  On  Good  Birth.  Heracleides,  in  the  Epitome  of 
Sotion,  and  others  say  that  he  was  brought  up  in 
Samos,  where  the  Athenians  had  made  a  plantation, 
and  only  came  to  Athens  at  the  age  of  eighteen  when 
Xenocrates  was  conducting  his  school  in  the  Academy 
and  Aristotle  at  Chalcis  (i.e.  323/2  B.C.).  After  the 
death  of  Alexander  of  Macedon  and  the  expulsion  of 
the  Athenians  by  Perdiccas,  he  followed  his  father 
(they  say)  to  Colophon.  He  spent  some  while  there 
and  gathered  disciples  round  him,  and  then  returned 
to  Athens  in  the  year  of  Anaxicrates.  For  a  time  he 
pursued  Philosophy  in  association  with  others ;  after- 

1  The  Philaidae  were  a  well-known  house  of  old-established 
nobility  with  a  legendary  pedigree  going  back  to  Ajax  and 
Aeacus. 


EPICURUS 

wards  he  established  the  special  sect  called  by  his 
name  and  appeared  on  his  own  account.  He  says 
himself  that  he  first  touched  Philosophy  at  the  age 
of  fourteen.  But  Apollodorus  the  Epicurean  says 
in  Bk.  i.  of  his  Life  of  Epicurus,  that  he  was  led  to 
Philosophy  by  dissatisfaction  with  his  schoolmasters 
who  had  failed  to  explain  to  him  Hesiod's  lines  about 
Chaos.  Hermippus  says  that  he  had  been  an  ele- 
mentary schoolmaster  himself  but  afterwards  fell  in 
with  the  books  of  Democritus  and  threw  himself  at 
once  into  Philosophy,  and  that  this  is  why  Timon 
says  of  him  : — 

From  the  island  of  Saruos  the  loudest  and  last 

Of  the  swaggering  scientists  came  ; 
'Twas  a  dominie's  brat  whose  defects  in  bon  ton 

Might  have  put  the  creation  to  shame. 

His  brothers,  too,  were  converted  by  him  and 
followed  his  Philosophy.  There  were  three  of  them, 
and  their  names  were  Neocles,  Charidemus,  and 
Aristobulus,  as  we  are  told  by  Philodemus  the  Epi- 
curean in  his  Compendium  of  Philosophers,  Bk.  x. 
Another  associate  was  a  slave  of  his  called  Mys,  as 
Myronianus  says  in  his  Summary  of  Historical  Parallels. 
Diotimus  the  Stoic,  who  hated  him,  has  calumniated 
him  savagely  by  producing  fifty  lewd  letters  as  the 
work  of  Epicurus.  So  has  he  who  collected  under  the 
name  of  Epicurus  the  correspondence  ascribed  to 
Chrysippus.  Other  calumniators  are  Poseidonius  the 
Stoic,  Nicolaus  and  Sotion  in  the  twelve  books  entitled 

8 


THE   LIFE   OF  EPICURUS 

An  Answer  to  Diodes,  which  deal  with  the  observance 
of  the  twentieth  day  of  the  month,1  and  Dionysius  of 
Halicarnassus.  They  actually  say  that  he  used  to 
accompany  his  mother  on  her  rounds  into  cottages, 
and  recite  her  spells  for  her,  and  that  he  helped  his 
father  to  teach  children  their  letters  for  a  miserable 
pittance.  Nay,  that  he  played  the  pimp  to  one  of  his 
brothers,  and  kept  Leontion  the  courtesan.  That  he 
gave  out  as  his  own  the  atomic  theory  of  Democritus 
and  the  Hedonism  of  Aristippus.  That  he  was  not  a 
true  born  Athenian  citizen,  as  we  learn  from  Timo- 
crates  and  the  work  on  The  Early  Years  of  Epicurus  by 
Herodotus.  That  he  heaped  shameful  adulation  on 
Mithres  the  intendant  of  Lysimachus,  addressing  him 
in  correspondence  as  Gracious  Preserver,  and  My  very 
good  Lord.  Nay,  he  even  bestowed  the  same  syco- 
phantic flatteries  on  Idomeneus,  on  Herodotus,  and  on 
Timocrates,  who  exposed  his  secret  abominations.  In 
his  correspondence  he  writes  to  Leontion,  'Gracious 
God,  darling  Leontion,  how  your  sweet  letter  set  me 
clapping  and  cheering  when  I  read  it';  and  to  Themista, 
the  wife  of  Leonteus,  '  If  you  do  not  both  pay  me  a  visit, 
I  shall  prove  a  very  stone  of  Sisyphus  to  roll  at  a  push 
wherever  you  and  Themista  invite  me ' ;  and  to  Pytho- 
cles,  then  in  the  bloom  of  his  youth,  '  Here  I  shall  sit 

1  The  twentieth  of  each  month  was  a  regular  school  holiday. 
Epicurus  enjoined  in  his  will  that  the  day  (as  well  as  his  birth- 
day) should  be  celebrated  as  a  feast  in  honour  of  himself  by  all 
his  followers. 


EPICURUS 

awaiting  your  delightful  and  divine  advent.'  In 
another  letter  to  Themista,  according  to  Theodoras  in 
Bk.  iv.  of  his  work  Against  Epicurus,  he  calls  her 
'  Queen  and  huntress  chaste  and  fair.' l 

He  corresponded,  they  allege,  with  a  host  of 
courtesans,  particularly  with  Leontion,  with  whom 
Metrodorus  also  fell  in  love.  Further,  in  the  work 
On  the  Moral  End,  he  writes :  '  For  my  part  I  can  form 
no  notion  of  the  good  if  I  am  to  leave  out  the  pleasures 
of  taste  and  sex,  of  hearing  and  of  form.'  And  (they 
say)  in  the  letter  to  Pythocles  he  writes,  'For  God's 
sake,  crowd  on  sail  and  away  from  all  "culture"!' 
Epictetus  calls  him  a  lewd  writer  and  reviles  him  in 
round  terms.  Nay,  worse,  Timocrates,  the  brother  of 
Metrodorus,  a  disciple  who  had  deserted  the  School, 
says  in  his  Paradise  of  Delights  that  Epicurus  used  to 
vomit  twice  a  day  in  consequence  of  his  riotous  living, 
and  that  he  himself  escaped  by  the  skin  of  his  teeth 
from  the  'midnight  lore'  and  'mystical  fellowship.' 
Further,  that  Epicurus  was  grossly  ignorant  of  science 
and  even  more  ignorant  of  the  art  of  life ;  that  he  fell 
into  so  pitiable  a  habit  of  body  as  not  to  be  able  to  rise 
from  his  litter  for  years  on  end ;  that  he  spent  a  mina 
a  day  on  his  table,  as  he  writes  himself  to  Leontion  and 

1  The  text  here  is  purely  conjectural.  My  rendering  follows 
Usener's  suggestion,  according  to  which  the  scandal  consisted 
in  applying  to  Themista  an  epithet  (dpidyvij,  'most  virginal') 
which  could  only  be  used  properly  of  a  maiden  goddess, 
and  specially  of  Artemis  the  virgin  huntress  and  protector  of 
maidens. 

10 


THE   LIFE  OF  EPICURUS 

to  the  philosophers  at  Mytilene.  That  he  and  Metro- 
dorus  enjoyed  the  favours  of  Mammarion,  Hedeia, 
Erotion,  Nicidion l  and  other  courtesans.  That  in  the 
thirty-seven  books  of  his  treatise  on  Nature  he  is  nearly 
always  repeating  himself  and  transcribing  the  ideas  of 
others,  especially  of  Nausiphanes,  and  says  in  so  many 
words,  '  But  enough  of  this ;  the  fellow's  mouth  was 
always  in  labour  with  some  piece  of  sophistic  braga- 
doccio,  like  those  of  so  many  others  of  the  slaves.' 
And  Epicurus  is  charged  with  having  said  himself  of 
Nausiphanes  in  his  letters,  '  this  threw  him  into  such 
a  passion  that  he  started  a  personal  polemic  against 
me,  and  had  the  face  to  call  me  his  scholar."  Indeed 
he  used  to  call  Nausiphanes  a  'mollusc,'  a  'boor,'  a 
'quack,'  and  a  'strumpet.'  The  Platonists  he  called 
'Dionysius'  lickspittles,'  and  Plato  himself  'that  thing 
of  gold.'  Aristotle,  he  said,  was  a  rake  who  ran 
through  his  patrimony  and  then  turned  mountebank 2 
and  druggist.  Protagoras  was  styled  'the  Porter' 
and  'Democritus'  scrivener,'  and  reproached  with  being 
a  village  dominie.  Heracleitus  he  called  '  the  Muddler,' 
Democritus  'Dumb-ocritus,'  Antidorus  'Zany-dorus,' 
the  Cynics  'the  national  enemy,'  the  dialecticians  'a 
general  pest,'  Pyrrho  'Block'  and  'Boor.'3 

1  The  form  of  the  names  stamps  the  ladies  in  question  as 
'demi-mondaines.'    We  might  venture  on  translating  Leontion 
and  Nicidion,  with  Wallace,  by  Leonie  and  Victorine.     For 
the  other  three  names  try  Maimie,  Cherisette,  and  Desire's. 

2  Following  the  reading  suggested  by  Usener. 

3  I  have  done  my  best  to  reproduce  the  effect  of  these  abusive 

II 


EPICURUS 

Now  all  this  is  stark  madness,  There  are  abundant 
witnesses  to  his  unsurpassed  goodwill  to  all  mankind  : 
his  native  city,  which  honoured  him  with  statues  of 
bronze ;  his  friends,  who  were  too  numerous  to  be 
reckoned  by  whole  cities ;  his  followers,  who  were  all 
held  spellbound  by  the  charms  of  his  doctrine — except 
Metrodorus  of  Stratonice,  who  deserted  to  Carneades, 
perhaps  because  he  was  depressed  by  his  master's  un- 
rivalled merits  ; l  his  school,  which  has  maintained  an 
unbroken  existence,  though  almost  all  others  have  had 
their  seasons  of  eclipse,  and  has  been  under  a  succes- 
sion of  innumerable  heads,  all  of  them  faithful  to  the 
persuasion ;  his  gratitude  to  his  parents,  beneficence 
to  his  brothers,  and  the  humanity  to  his  servants 

distortions  of  names  and  vulgar  epithets.  Heracleitus  is  called 
a  'Muddler,'  because  he  held  that  everything  is  changing  into 
something  else,  and  so,  in  his  own  phrase,  looks  on  the  world 
as  a  great  olla  podrida.  Democritus  was  called  Lerocritus 
because  all  he  said  was  \fjpos,  'bosh.'  So  we  may  render  by 
Dumb-ocritus,  with  the  insinuation  that  no  word  of  sense  ever 
came  from  his  mouth.  The  'dialecticians'  \villbetheformal 
logicians  of  the  Megaric  school,  Stilpo  and  Diodorus  and 
their  associates,  or  possibly  Zeno  of  Cittium,  the  founder  of 
Stoicism. 

1  This  sentence  gives  a  good  illustration  of  the  way  in  which 
'  Diogenes '  has  been  put  together.  As  the  words  stand,  the 
'  master' deserted  by  Metrodorus  of  Stratonice  cannot  gram- 
matically be  other  than  Epicurus.  This  is  historically  absurd, 
since  Carneades  belongs  to  a  time  a  full  century  later  than 
Epicurus.  It  is  manifest  that  we  have  here  incorporated  with 
the  text  a  note  on  the  defection  of  Metrodorus,  in  which 
mention  was  made  of  the  merits  of  his  immediate  '  master,'  the 
head  of  the  Epicurean  school  in  the  time  of  Carneades. 

12 


THE   LIFE  OF   EPICURUS 

which  may  be  seen  from  his  will,  and  from  the  fact 
that  they  shared  in  his  Philosophy,  the  most  notable 
of  them  being  the  aforesaid  Mys ;  in  a  word,  his 
universal  benevolence.  As  for  his  piety  towards  the 
gods  and  his  native  land,  words  cannot  describe  them. 
'Twas  from  excess  of  conscientiousness  that  he  would 
not  so  much  as  touch  political  life.  Consider,  too, 
that  though  Hellas  had  then  been  overtaken  by  most 
troublous  times,  he  spent  his  whole  life  at  home,  except 
that  he  made  one  or  two  flying  visits  to  Ionia  to  see 
his  friends  in  that  quarter,  who,  in  their  turn,  flocked 
from  all  parts  to  share  the  life  in  his  Garden,  as  we  are 
told  particularly  by  Apollodorus,  who  adds  that  he 
payed  eighty  minae  for  the  site.  The  life  they  led 
there,  so  says  Diocles  in  Bk.  in.  of  his  Brief  Relation, 
was  of  the  simplest  and  plainest.  They  were  amply 
content,  so  he  says,  with  half  a  pint  of  vin  ordinaire  • 
their  regular  drink  was  water.  Epicurus,  he  says, 
disapproved  of  the  community  of  goods  sanctioned  by 
the  saying  of  Pythagoras,  '  what  belongs  to  friends  is 
common.'  Such  a  system,  he  thought,  implies  distrust, 
and  where  there  is  distrust  there  can  be  no  true  friend- 
ship. He  says  himself  in  his  letters  that  he  can  be 
satisfied  with  water  and  coarse  bread.  And  again, 
'  Pray  send  me  part  of  a  pot  of  cheese,  that  I  may  be 
able  to  enjoy  a  varied  table  when  I  am  in  the  mind.' 
Such  was  the  character  of  the  man  who  made  '  Pleasure 
the  end 'an  article  of  his  creed.  So  Athenaeus  cele- 
brates him  in  the  following  epigram  : — 

13 


EPICURUS 

Alas,  we  toil  for  nought ;  the  woful  seed 
Of  strife  and  wars  is  man's  insatiate  greed  : 
True  riches  harbour  in  a  little  space, 
Blind  Fancy  labours  in  an  endless  chase  ; 
This  truth  Neocles'  deep- considering  son 
From  heavenly  Muse  or  Pytho's  tripod  won. 

\Ve  shall  see  the  truth  of  this  still  better,  as  we  pro- 
ceed, from  his  own  writings  and  sayings. 

Among  the  ancients,  says  Diocles,  his  preference 
was  for  Anaxagoras,  though  he  controverted  him  on 
some  points,  and  for  Archelaus  the  teacher  of  Socrates. 
He  says  further  that  he  trained  his  followers  to  learn 
his  compositions  by  heart.  Apollodorus  says  in  his 
Chronology  that  he  had  heard  Nausiphaues  and  Praxi- 
phanes,  but  he  himself  denies  it  in  his  letter  to 
Eurylochus,  where  he  says  he  had  no  master  but  him- 
self. He  even  declares  (and  Hermarchus  agrees 
with  him),  that  there  never  was  any  such  philosopher 
as  Leucippus1  whom  Apollodorus  the  Epicurean  and 
others  speak  of  as  the  teacher  of  Democritus. 
Demetrius  of  Magnesia  adds  that  Epicurus  had  heard 
Xenocrates. 

His  style  is  plain  and  matter  of  fact,  and  is  cen- 
sured by  the  grammarian  Aristophanes  as  very  tame. 
But  he  was  so  lucid  that  in  his  Rhetoric  he  insists  on 
no  stylistic  quality  but  lucidity.  In  correspondence 
he  used  '  Fare-well '  and  '  Live  worthily  '  in  place  of  the 
customary  formula  of  salutation. 

1  On  this  assertion  one  can  only  remark  in  the  language  of 
Dr.  Johnson,  that  '  If  Epicurus  said  that,  Epicurus  lied.' 


THE  LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

Antigonus  says  in  his  Life  of  Epicurus  that  he  copied 
his  Canon  from  the  Tripod  of  Nausiphanes,  and  that  he 
had  heard  not  only  Nausiphanes  but  Pamphilus  the 
Platonist  in  Samos.  That  he  began  Philosophy  at  the 
age  of  twelve,  and  became  head  of  his  school  at 
thirty-two. 

According  to  the  Chronology  of  Apollodorus  he  was 
born  in  Olympiad  109/3,  in  the  archonship  of  Sosigenes, 
on  the  7th  of  Gamelion,  seven  years  after  Plato's  death. 
That  he  first  collected  a  school  in  Mytilene  and  Lam- 
psacus  at  the  age  of  thirty-two.  This  lasted  for  five 
years,  at  the  end  of  which  he  migrated,  as  said,  to 
Athens.  His  death  fell  in  Olympiad  127/2,  in  the 
year  of  Pytharatus,  at  the  age  of  seventy-two.  He 
was  followed  as  head  of  the  School  by  Hermarchus  of 
Mytilene,  son  of  Agemortus.  The  cause  of  death  was 
strangury  due  to  calculus,  as  Hermarchus,  too,  says  in 
his  correspondence.  The  fatal  illness  lasted  a  fort- 
night. Hermarchus  further  relates  that  he  entered  a 
brazen  bath  filled  with  hot  water,  called  for  some  neat 
wine  which  he  took  off  at  a  draught,  enjoined  his 
friends  not  to  forget  his  doctrines,  and  so  came  to  his 
end.  I  have  composed  the  following  lines  upon  him  : — 

Farewell,  my  friends  ;  be  mindful  of  my  lore  ; 
Thus  Epicurus  spoke, — and  was  no  more  : 
Hot  was  the  bath,  and  hot  the  bowl  he  quaffed  ; 
Chill  Hades  followed  on  the  after-draught.1 

Such  then  was  the  tenour  of  his  life,  and  the  manner 
1  Sad  doggerel — but  not  more  so  than  the  original. 
15 


EPICURUS 

of  his  end.  His  will  runs  as  follows.  [The  main  pro- 
visions are  that  the  'Garden  and  its  appurtenances' 
are  to  be  held  in  trust  for  the  successors  of  Epicurus, 
and  their  associates.  A  house  in  the  suburb  Melite  is 
to  be  inhabited  by  Hermarchus  and  his  disciples  for 
the  former's  lifetime.  Provision  is  made  for  the  due 
performance  of  the  ritual  for  the  dead  in  memory  of 
the  parents  and  brethren  of  Epicurus,  for  the  regular 
keeping  of  his  birthday,  for  the  regular  festival  of  the 
twentieth  of  each  month,  and  for  annual  commemora- 
tion of  his  brothers  and  his  friend  Polyaenus.  The 
son  of  Metrodorus  and  the  son  of  Polyaenus  are  to  be 
under  the  guardianship  of  the  trustees  on  condition 
that  they  live  with  Hermarchus  and  share  his  Phil- 
osophy. The  daughter  of  Metrodorus  is  to  receive  a 
dowry  out  of  the  estate  on  condition  that  she  behaves 
well  and  marries  with  the  approval  of  Hermarchus. 
Provision  is  to  be  made  for  an  aged  and  needy  member 
of  the  community.  The  'books'  of  Epicurus,  i.e.  pre- 
sumably the  manuscripts  of  his  works,  are  bequeathed 
to  Hermarchus.  If  Hermarchus  should  die  before  the 
children  of  Metrodorus  come  of  age,  they  are  to  be 
under  the  guardianship  of  the  trustees.  Mys  and 
three  other  slaves  are  to  receive  their  freedom.] 

The  following  lines  were  written  to  Idomeneus  on 
the  very  point  of  death  :  '  I  write  these  lines  to  you 
and  your  friends  as  I  bring  to  a  close  the  last  happy 
day  of  my  life.  I  am  troubled  with  strangury  and 
dysentery  in  unsurpassable  degree,  but  I  can  confront 
16 


THE  LIFE   OF  EPICURUS 

it  all  with  a  joy  of  mind  due  to  remembrance  of 
our  past  discussions.  To  you  I  leave  the  injunction  to 
take  care  of  the  children  of  Metrodorus  as  befits  your 
lifelong  association  with  me  and  Philosophy.' 

'  He  had  numerous  disciples.  Specially  distinguished 
were  Metrodorus  of  Lampsacus,  son  of  Athenaeus, 
(or  Timocrates)  and  Sande,  who  never  left  him  after 
making  his  acquaintance  except  for  one  six  months'  visit 
to  his  birthplace,  whence  he  returned  to  him.  He  was 
an  excellent  man  in  all  respects,  as  is  attested  by 
Epicurus  himself  in  sundry  Dedications  and  in  the 
Timocrates,  Bk.  in.  With  all  these  excellences  he 
bestowed  his  sister  Batis  on  Idomeneus,  and  took 
Leontion  the  Athenian  courtesan  under  his  protection 
as  a  morganatic  wife.  He  was  imperturbable  in  the 
face  of  troubles  and  death,  as  Epicurus  says  in  his 
Metrodorus,  Bk.  I.  They  say  he  died  in  his  fifty-third 
year,  seven  years  before  Epicurus.  Epicurus  himself 
implies  that  he  had  predeceased  him  by  the  in- 
junction in  the  aforesaid  will  to  care  for  his  children. 
Another  was  the  aforesaid  Timocrates,  a  worthless 
brother  of  Metrodorus.  [Here  follows  a  list  of  the 
works  of  M.] 

'Another  was  Polyaenus  of  Lampsacus,  son  of 
Athenodorus,  according  to  Philodemus  an  upright 
and  amiable  man.  Also  Hermarchus  of  Mytilene,  son 
of  Agemortus,  who  succeeded  to  the  headship  of  the 
school.  He  was  born  of  poor  parents,  and  originally 
a  teacher  of  rhetoric  by  profession.  The  following 
B  17 


EPICURUS 

admirable  works  are  ascribed  to  him.  [The  list 
follows.]  He  was  an  able  man  and  died  of  a  palsy. 

'  Item,  Leonteus  of  Lampsacus  and  his  wife  Themista, 
the  same  with  whom  Epicurus  corresponded.  Item, 
Colotes  and  Idomeneus,  both  of  Lampsacus.  These 
are  the  most  eminent  names.  We  must  include  Poly- 
stratus  who  followed  Hermarchus,  and  was  succeeded 
by  Dionysius,  and  he  by  Basileides.  Apollodorus,  the 
'despot  of  the  Garden,'  who  composed  over  four 
hundred  books,  is  also  a  man  of  note.  Then  there 
are  the  two  Ptolemies  of  Alexandria,  the  dark  and 
the  fair;  Zeno  of  Sidon,  a  pupil  of  Apollodorus  and 
a  prolific  author ;  Demetrius,  surnamed  the  Laconic  ; 
Diogenes  of  Tarsus,  the  author  of  the  Selected  Essays ; 
Orion  ;  and  some  others  whom  the  genuine  Epicureans 
decry  as  Sophists. 

'  There  were  also  three  other  persons  of  the  name 
Epicurus:  (1)  the  son  of  Leonteus  and  Themista, 
(2)  an  Epicurus  of  Magnesia,  (3)  a  maitre  d'armes. 
Epicurus  was  a  most  prolific  author.'  [Follows  a  list 
of  his  works,  and  the  writer  then  proceeds  to  give  a 
summary  of  his  doctrine.] ' 

The  preceding  pages  have  given  us  a  fairly  full 
account  of  the  life  and  personality  of  Epicurus  as 
known  to  the  students  of  antiquity.  I  may  supplement 
it  with  a  few  remarks  intended  to  make  the  chronology 
clear,  and  to  call  attention  to  one  or  two  of  the  salient 
points  in  the  character  which  it  discloses  to  us. 

First  as  to  chronology.  Of  the  authorities  used  in 
18 


THE   LIFE   OF  EPICURUS 

the  Life  far  the  best  is  Apollodorus,  whose  versified 
Chronology  embodied  the  results  of  the  great  Eratos- 
thenes. His  data  make  it  clear  that  Epicurus  was 
born  on  the  7th  of  Gamelion  (i.e.  in  our  January) 
341  B.C.,  and  died  in  270  B.C.  They  also  enable  us 
to  fix  his  first  appearance  as  an  independent  teacher 
in  Mytilene  and  the  neighbourhood,  approximately 
in  310,  and  his  removal  to  Athens  in  306/5  B.C.  We 
may  take  it  also  as  certain,  from  other  sources  as  well 
as  from  the  evidence  of  Timon,  that  the  place  of 
Epicurus'  birth  was  the  island  of  Samos,  where  a 
colony  or  plantation  was  established  by  the  Athenians 
in  the  year  352/1,  Neocles,  the  father  of  Epicurus, 
being,  as  we  learn  from  Strabo,  one  of  the  settlers. 
When  the  Athenians  were  expelled  from  Samos  by  the 
regent  Perdiccas  in  322,  Neocles  for  unknown  reasons 
preferred  emigrating  to  the  Ionian  town  of  Colophon 
to  returning  to  Athens,  and  Epicurus  followed  him. 
The  assertion  of  his  enemies  that  he  was  no  true 
Athenian  citizen  (this  would  be  their  way  of  explaining 
his  lifelong  abstention  from  public  affairs),  may  have 
no  better  foundation  than  the  fact  of  his  birth  at  a 
distance  from  Athens,  or,  again,  may  be  explained  by 
supposing  that  Neocles  had  some  special  connection 
with  the  Ionic  cities  of  the  Asiatic  coast.  In  any 
case  the  salient  points  to  take  note  of  are  that  Epicurus 
must  have  received  his  early  education  in  Samos  (itself 
an  Ionian  island),  and  that  his  philosophical  position 
had  been  definitely  settled  before  he  left  Asia  Minor 

19 


EPICURUS 

to  establish  himself  at  Athens.  This  will  account  for 
the  attitude  of  aloofness  steadily  maintained  by  the 
society  of  the  '  Garden '  towards  the  great  indigenous 
Athenian  philosophical  institutions,  and  also  for  the 
marked  lonicisms  of  Epicurus'  technical  terminology. 
It  is  clear  from  the  narratives  preserved  by  Diogenes 
that  the  family  of  Neocles  was  in  straitened  circum- 
stances, but  there  is  no  more  ground  to  take  the 
polemical  representation  of  Neocles  and  his  wife  as  a 
hedge  dominie  and  village  sorceress  seriously  than 
there  is  to  believe  the  calumnies  of  Demosthenes  on 
the  parents  of  Aeschines.  That  Neocles  was  an 
elementary  schoolmaster  may,  however,  be  true,  since 
it  is  asserted  by  the  satirist  Timon,  who  belongs  to 
the  generation  immediately  after  Epicurus,  and  the 
schoolmaster,  as  we  see  from  the  Mimes  of  Herodas, 
was  not  a  person  of  much  consideration  in  the  third 
century.  With  regard  to  the  date  of  the  establishment 
of  Epicurus  at  Athens  one  should  note,  by  way  of 
correcting  erroneous  impressions  about  'Post-Aris- 
totelian Philosophy,'  that  when  Epicurus  made  his 
appearance  in  the  city  which  was  still  the  centre  of 
Greek  intellectual  activity,  Theophrastus,  the  immedi- 
ate successor  of  Aristotle,  had  not  completed  half  of 
his  thirty-four  years'  presidency  over  the  Peripatetic 
school,  and  Xenocrates,  the  third  head  of  the  Academy, 
and  an  immediate  pupil  of  Plato,  had  only  been  dead 
some  eight  years.  The  illusion  by  which  we  often 
think  of  the  older  schools  as  having  run  their  course 

2O 


THE   LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

before  Epicurus  came  to  the  front  may  be  easily  dis- 
pelled by  the  recollection  that  Epicurus's  chief  disciples, 
Metrodorus,  Hermarchus,  Colotes,  all  wrote  special 
attacks  on  various  Platonic  dialogues,  and  that 
Hermarchus  moreover  wrote  a  polemic  against  Aris- 
totle and  Epicurus  himself  one  against  Theophrastus, 
while,  as  we  shall  see  later,  we  still  possess  a  '  discourse 
of  Socrates'  in  which  an  anonymous  member  of  the 
Academy  sharply  criticises  Epicurus  as  the  author  of 
superficial  doctrines  which  are  just  coming  into  vogue 
with  the  half-educated. 

With  regard  to  the  personal  character  of  Epicurus 
one  or  two  interesting  things  stand  out  very  clearly 
from  the  conflicting  accounts  of  admirers  like  the 
original  writer  of  the  main  narrative  which  figures  in 
Diogenes,  and  again  Lucretius,  and  enemies,  like  the 
detractors  mentioned  by  Diogenes,  or  unfriendly  critics 
like  Plutarch  and  his  Academic  authorities.  We  may 
disregard  altogether  the  representation  of  Epicurus 
and  his  associates  as  sensualists  who  ruined  their  con- 
stitutions by  debauchery.  There  is  abundant  testimony, 
not  solely  from  Epicurean  sources,  for  the  simplicity  of 
the  life  led  in  the  Garden,  not  to  say  that  most  of  the 
calumnious  stories  are  discredited  by  the  fact  that 
the  worst  of  them  were  told  by  personal  or  professional 
enemies  like  Timocrates,  the  Judas  of  the  society,  and 
the  Stoic  philosopher  who  palmed  off  a  fictitious  'lewd 
correspondence '  on  the  world  under  the  name  of 
Epicurus.  Abuse  of  this  kind  was  a  regular  feature 
21 


EPICURUS 

of  controversy,  and  deserves  just  as  much  credit  as 
the  accusations  of  secret  abominations  which  Demos- 
thenes and  Aeschines  flung  at  each  other,  that  is  to 
say,  none  at  all.  What  we  do  see  clearly  is  that 
Epicurus  was  personally  a  man  of  clinging  and  winning 
temperament,  quick  to  gain  friendship  and  steadfast  in 
keeping  it.  There  is  something  of  a  feminine  winsome- 
ness  about  his  solicitude  for  the  well-being  of  his 
friends  and  their  children,  and  the  extravagant  grati- 
tude which  the  high-flown  phrases  quoted  from  his 
letters  show  for  the  minor  offices  of  friendship.  At 
the  same  time  Epicurus  and  his  'set'  exhibit  the 
weaknesses  natural  to  a  temperament  of  this  kind. 
Their  horror  of  the  anxieties  and  burdens  of  family 
life,  their  exaggerated  estimate  of  the  misery  which 
is  caused  in  human  life  by  fear  of  death  and  the 
possibilities  of  a  life  to  come — matters  with  which  we 
shall  find  ourselves  closely  concerned  in  later  chapters, 
— testify  to  a  constitutional  timidity  and  a  lack  of 
moral  robustness.  The  air  of  the  Garden  is,  to  say 
the  least  of  it,  morally  relaxing ;  one  feels  in  reading 
the  remains  of  Epicurus  and  Metrodorus  that  one  is 
dealing  with  moral  invalids,  and  that  Nietzsche  was 
not  far  from  the  truth  when  he  spoke  of  Epicurus  as 
the  first  good  example  in  history  of  a  'decadent.' 
Partly  we  may  explain  the  fact  by  the  well-attested 
physical  invalidism  of  the  founders  of  the  school. 
Epicurus,  as  we  see  from  Diogenes,  though  he  lived 
to  a  decent  age,  was  for  years  in  feeble  health,  and  it 

22 


THE   LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

is  significant  that  Metrodorus  and  Colotes,  two  of  his 
chief  disciples,  died  before  him  at  a  comparatively 
early  age.  We  shall  probably  find  the  key  at  once  to 
the  Epicurean  insistence  on  the  life  of  simple  and 
homely  fare,  and  to  the  violence  with  which,  as  we 
shall  see,  he  and  his  friends  insisted  on  the  value  of 
the  'pleasures  of  the  belly,'  to  the  great  scandal  of 
their  later  critics,  in  the  assumption  that  they  were 
life-long  dyspeptics.  (The  ancients  simply  inverted 
the  order  of  causation  when  they  observed  that  the 
bad  health  of  Epicurus  and  Metrodorus  might  be 
regarded  as  God's  judgment  on  the  impiety  of  their 
tenets.) 

The  ugliest  feature  in  the  character  of  Epicurus,  as 
revealed  in  his  life  and  remains,  is  his  inexcusable 
ingratitude  to  his  teachers,  and  his  wholesale  abuse 
of  all  the  thinkers  who  had  gone  before  him.  This 
tone  of  systematic  detraction  was  taken  up  by  his 
friends ;  the  quotations  given  in  Plutarch's  Essay 
against  Colotes  are  a  perfect  mine  of  scurrilities 
directed  against  every  eminent  thinker  of  the  past  or 
the  present  who  had  in  any  way  strayed  from  the 
path  of  rigid  orthodoxy  as  understood  by  Epicurus. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  object  of  all  this 
abuse  was  to  make  Epicurus  appear,  as  he  claimed  to 
be,  no  man's  pupil  but  his  own,  the  one  and  only 
revealer  of  the  way  of  salvation.  And  yet  it  is  quite 
clear,  as  we  shall  see,  that  Epicurus  is  in  every  way 
the  least  independent  of  the  philosophers  of  antiquity. 

23 


EPICURUS 

There  is  no  reason  to  doubt  that  he  had  originally 
been  instructed  in  Samos  by  a  member  of  the  Platonic 
school,  and  the  bitterness  with  which  the  Academy 
afterwards  attacked  his  character  and  doctrines  may, 
as  has  been  suggested,  have  been  partly  due  to  the 
sense  that  he  was,  in  some  sort,  an  apostate  from  the 
fold.  His  treatment  of  the  teachers  from  whom  he 
had  learned  the  Atomism  which  has  come  to  be 
thought  of  as  his  characteristic  doctrine  is  absolutely 
without  excuse. 

We  shall  see  in  the  next  chapter  that  the  whole 
doctrine  is  a  blundering  perversion  of  the  really 
scientific  Atomism  of  a  much  greater  man,  Democritus, 
and  that  Epicurus  had  undoubtedly  derived  his  know- 
ledge of  the  doctrine  from  Nausiphanes,  a  philosopher 
whose  importance  we  are  only  now  beginning  to  learn 
from  the  Herculaneum  papyri.  Yet  both  Democritus 
and  Nausiphanes  are,  on  the  showing  of  Epicurus' 
own  admirers,  covered  by  him  with  the  coarsest  abuse, 
and  one  may  even  suspect  that  we  have  to  thank 
Epicurean  anxiety  to  conceal  the  dependence  of  the 
adored  master  on  his  teacher  for  the  fact  that  until 
Herculaneum  began  to  yield  up  its  secrets,  Nausiphanes 
was  no  more  than  an  empty  name  to  us.  This  vulgar 
self-exaltation  by  abuse  of  the  very  persons  to  whom 
one  is  indebted  for  all  one's  ideas  distinguishes 
Epicurus  from  all  the  other  Greek  thinkers  who  have 
made  a  name  for  themselves,  Plato  is  almost  over- 
anxious to  mark  his  debt  to  his  Pythagorean  teachers, 
24 


THE   LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

and  the  way  in  which  he  does  so,  by  putting  dis- 
coveries of  his  own  into  the  mouth  of  the  Pythagorean 
astronomer  Timaeus,  has  played  sad  havoc  with  the 
histories  of  Greek  science.  Aristotle  has  undoubtedly 
rather  more  self-importance  then  is  good  for  most  men, 
but  even  he  stops  short  at  regarding  his  own  system 
as  the  final  philosophy  towards  which  his  predecessors 
were  unconsciously  progressing.  It  was  reserved  for 
Epicurus  to  put  forward  a  clumsy  amalgam  of  incon- 
sistent beliefs,  and  to  trust  to  bluster  to  conceal  the 
sources  of  his  borrowings. 

A  few  words  may  be  said  here  as  to  the  amount  of 
the  extant  remains  of  Epicurean  literature,  and  the 
later  fortune  of  the  School.  Of  the  actual  works  of 
Epicurus  the  whole  has  perished,  apart  from  scattered 
fragments  preserved  in  quotations  of  later  authors, 
mostly  unfriendly.  We  possess,  however,  two  un- 
doubtedly genuine  letters,  one  to  Herodotus  on  the 
general  principles  of  Epicurean  Atomism,  and  another 
to  Menoeceus  containing  a  summary  of  ethical  teaching, 
both  inserted  in  Diogenes'  Life.  The  Life  also  contains 
two  other  documents,  purporting  to  be  by  Epicurus, 
(1)  a  letter  to  Pythocles  on  astronomy  and  meteorology, 
and  (2)  a  set  of  Kvptai  So£<u  or  Select  Apophthegms  forming 
a  brief  catechism  of  the  main  points  of  the  doctrine. 

The  accuracy  of  the  first  of  these  is  evinced  by  its 
close  agreement  with  what  we  are  told  by  later  authors 
of  the  physical  doctrine  of  Epicurus,  particularly  with 
the  corresponding  sections  of  the  poem  of  Lucretius. 

25 


EPICURUS 

This  letter  cannot  possibly  be  a  genuine  work  of 
Epicurus,  and  we  know  from  Philodemus  that  even 
in  his  own  time  (first  century  B.C.)  its  authenticity 
was  doubted.  It  is  pretty  certainly  an  excerpt  made 
by  some  early  Epicurean  from  the  voluminous  lost 
work  on  Physics  and  thrown  into  epistolary  form  in 
imitation  of  the  two  genuine  letters.  As  to  the 
second  document,  it  was  known  to  Philodemus  and 
Cicero  under  its  present  title,  and  appears,  as  Usener 
holds,  to  be  an  early  compendium  made  up  of  verbal 
extracts  of  what  were  considered  the  most  important 
statements  in  the  works  of  Epicurus  and  his  leading 
friends.  There  are  also  a  large  number  of  moral 
apophthegms  either  quoted  as  Epicurean  or  demon- 
strably  of  Epicurean  authorship  embedded  in  Cicero, 
Seneca,  Plutarch,  Porphyry,  the  Anthology  of  Stobaeus 
and  elsewhere.  Usener  has  shown  that  the  chief  source 
of  these  sayings  must  have  been  an  epitome  of  the 
correspondence  between  Epicurus  and  his  three  chief 
friends,  Metrodorus,  Polyaenus,  and  Hermarchus,  the 
four  recognised  Ka^ye/xoi'es  or  'doctors'  of  the  sect. 
From  later  Epicureans  we  have  the  great  poem  of 
Lucretius  who  can  be  shown  in  general  to  have 
followed  his  master  very  closely,  though  in  what 
strikes  a  modern  reader  as  his  highest  scientific 
achievement,  his  anticipations  of  the  doctrine  of  the 
evolution  of  species,  he  is  probably  reproducing  not 
Epicurus  but  his  own  poetical  model  Empedocles.  The 
excavation  of  Herculancum,  and  the  subsequent  deci- 
26 


THE   LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

pherment  of  the  papyri  found  there,  has  also  put  us 
in  possession  of  a  great  deal  of  very  second-rate  stuff 
from  the  hand  of  Philodemus. 

A  word  as  to  the  subsequent  fate  of  the  School. 
The  two  chief  characteristics  of  the  sect,  as  remarked 
by  the  ancients,  were  the  warmth  of  the  friendship 
subsisting  between  its  members,  and  their  absolute 
unity  of  opinion,  which  last,  however,  had  its  bad 
side,  since,  as  the  ancients  complain,  the  chief  reason 
of  the  absence  of  controversies  is  that  the  Epicureans 
read  nothing  but  the  works  of  Epicurus  and  the 
Ka^ijye/xdves,  and  treat  them  as  infallible  scriptures, 
even  being  expected  to  learn  the  Catechism  by 
heart.  A  third  peculiarity  was  the  almost  idolatrous 
adoration  paid  to  the  founder  who,  as  we  see  from 
Lucretius,  was  regarded  as  all  but  divine,  as  the 
one  and  only  man  who  had  redeemed  the  race  from 
universal  misery  by  pointing  out  the  path  to  true 
happiness. 

It  has  been  remarked  that  the  Epicurean  society  in 
many  ways  is  more  like  the  early  Christian  Church 
than  it  is  like  a  scientific  school.  Thus  (1)  it  is  not 
so  much  a  band  of  thinkers  as  a  group  of  persons 
united  by  a  common  rule  of  life.  (We  must  re- 
member, however,  that  this  'religious'  side  to  the 
association  between  the  members  of  a  '  school '  belong 
equally  to  Pythagoreanism  and  Platonism.)  (2)  Like 
the  Christians,  the  Epicureans  are  primarily  united  by 
the  '  love  of  the  brethren,'  and  by  a  common  devotion 
27 


EPICURUS 

to  a  personal  founder  who  is  regarded  rather  as  a 
Redeemer  from  misery  than  as  an  intellectual  teacher 
(though  here,  too,  we  must  not  forget  that  Pythagoras 
was  equally  to  his  early  disciples  a  divine  or  semi- 
divine  Redeemer,  with  the  difference  that  with  them 
it  was  largely  by  revealing  scientific  truth  that  he  was 
believed  to  have  effected  the  redemption).  (3)  Like 
the  Church,  the  Epicurean  society  is  indifferent  to 
differences  of  nationality,  sex,  social  status.  (4)  As 
Wallace  says,  the  correspondence  of  Epicurus  and  his 
friends  mixes  up  high  speculative  theories  with  homely 
matters  of  every-day  life,  such  as  the  regulation  of 
diet,  in  a  way  which  is  equally  characteristic  of  the 
New  Testament.  (5)  Epicureanism  has  also  its 
analogue  to  the  Christian  '  love-feasts '  in  the  monthly 
common  meals  which  are  provided  for  by  Epicurus  in 
his  will.  Similarly  his  concern  for  the  children  of 
Metrodorus  and  for  the  support  of  needy  and  aged 
brethren  reminds  us  of  the  care  of  the  early  Christians 
for  the  'poor  saints,'  the  widows,  and  the  orphans. 
The  two  societies  also  correspond  on  their  unfavourable 
side,  in  what  has  always  been  the  great  intellectual 
sin  of  the  Church,  undue  readiness  to  treat  its 
formulae  as  infallible  and  exempt  from  all  examina- 
tion. The  Epicurean  who  read  nothing  but  the 
Ka.d-iiytp.ovts  is  the  prototype  of  those  modern  Christians 
who  read  nothing  but  the  Bible  and  the  approved 
commentaries,  and  regard  criticism  and  free  inquiry 
as  the  work  of  the  devil.  If  the  Philosophy  of  the 
28 


THE   LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

Garden  bad  ever  become  a  widely  diffused  and  in- 
fluential theory  of  conduct,  it  must  necessarily  bave 
plunged  the  ancient  world  into  the  same  conflict 
between  '  science '  and  '  religion '  of  which  we  hear  too 
much  to-day. 

These  analogies — though  most  of  them  can  be  to 
some  extent  found  in  other  philosophical  schools— make 
it  all  the  more  interesting  to  note  that  the  Epicureans 
and  the  Christians,  though  representing  diametrically 
opposite  types  of  thought,  met  on  common  ground  as 
being  the  only  sects  who  openly  repudiated  the  estab- 
lished religion  and  scoffed  at  its  apparatus  of  public 
ceremonial.  The  Sceptic  avoided  the  collision  easily 
enough.  Precisely  because  he  held  that  unreasoning 
faith  is  involved  in  all  judgments  he  felt  no  call  to 
deny  the  theological  belief  of  his  fellows.  The 
Platonist  and  the  Stoic  stood  to  a  large  extent  on 
common  ground  with  popular  religion  in  their  de- 
votion to  their  belief  in  Providence  and  the  moral 
government  of  the  world,  to  which  the  Platonist  added 
a  fervid  faith  in  Theism  and  immortality  :  like  Broad 
Churchmen  to-day,  they  could  always  acquiesce  in  the 
details  of  popular  religion  by  putting  a  non-natural 
interpretation  on  everything  which,  in  its  plain  sense, 
seemed  objectionable  or  absurd.  But  the  Epicurean 
was  cut  off  from  these  expedients  by  the  fact 
that  it  was  one  of  his  cardinal  doctrines  that  'the 
gods '  exercise  no  influence  on  human  affairs,  as  the 
Christian  was  by  his  belief  that  they  were  'idols'  or 
29 


EPICURUS 

even  devils  who  could  not  be  worshipped  without 
blasphemy  against  the  true  God.  Not  that  the 
Epicureans,  like  the  Christians,  refused  to  take  part 
in  the  public  ceremonial  of  worship.  Philodemus 
expressly  appeals  to  the  exemplary  conduct  of 
Epicurus  himself  on  this  point.  But  they  made  no 
secret  of  their  scorn  for  the  popular  belief  in  Provi- 
dence, prayer,  and  retribution,  and  hence  no  amount 
of  external  compliance  could  clear  them  from  the 
charge  of  atheism  with  persons  for  whom  religion  was 
a  vital  affair.1  Lucian  (second  century  A.D.)  illustrates 
the  point  amusingly  in  his  account  of  the  ritual 
instituted  by  the  charlatan  Alexander  of  Aboni 
Teichos  who  set  up  an  oracle  which  gained  great 
repute  and  was  even  once  formally  consulted  by  the 
Emperor  Marcus.  Among  other  things,  Alexander 
started  a  mystical  ceremonial  from  which  he  used 
formally  to  exclude  all  'infidels,  Christians,  and 
Epicureans.'  In  the  course  of  the  worship  he  used  to 
cry,  '  Away  with  the  Christians ! '  the  congregation 
giving  the  response,  '  Away  with  the  Epicureans ! ' 
the  Christians  and  Epicureans  being  the  two  bodies 
who  were  persistently  infidel  from  Alexander's  point 
of  view.  Lucian  adds  that  Alexander  solemnly  burned 
the  works  of  the  objectionable  teacher,  and  that  it 
was  an  Epicurean  who  first  exposed  the  fraudulent 

1  As  Plutarch  says,  the  Epicurean  may  go  through  the 
ritual  of  religion,  but  it  can  bring  him  no  inward  joy,  since  he 
regards  it  as  an  empty  mummery. 

30 


THE  LIFE   OF  EPICURUS 

trickery  of  his  oracle,  and  narrowly  escaped  being 
lynched  by  the  devout  mob  for  doing  so. 

Much  earlier,  probably  about  200  B.C.,  there  appear 
to  have  been  actual  persecutions,  and  perhaps  even 
martyrdoms,  of  Epicureans  in  various  Greek  cities,  and 
we  know  that  works  were  published  in  the  style  of  the 
religious  tracts  of  our  own  day,  relating  the  judg- 
ments of  Heaven  on  Epicureans  and  their  miraculous 
conversions. 

As  to  the  internal  history  of  the  sect  there  is  not 
much  to  be  said,  since,  as  we  have  seen,  they  were 
too  indifferent  to  speculation  to  make  any  important 
innovations  on  the  original  teaching  of  the  '  doctors,' 
though,  as  we  have  yet  to  see,  there  was  at  least  some 
attempt  to  lay  the  foundations  of  an  Inductive  Method 
in  logic.  The  School  continued  to  flourish  as  a  distinct 
sect  well  down  into  the  third  century  after  Christ. 
The  names  of  a  number  of  prominent  Epicureans  of 
the  first  century  B.C.  are  well  known  to  us  from 
Cicero,  who  had  himself  attended  the  lectures  of  two 
of  them,  Phaedrus  and  Zeno  of  Sidon.  (It  should  be 
mentioned  that  before  Cicero's  time  the  house  of 
Epicurus  in  Melite  had  fallen  into  ruins  and  the 
gardens  of  the  philosophical  sects  had  been  ruined  in 
the  cruel  siege  of  Athens  by  Sulla.) 

When  Greek  philosophy  began  to  make  its  appear- 
ance in  Rome  itself  the  first  system  to  be  so  trans- 
ferred was  the  Epicurean.  Cicero  mentions  as  the 
first  Latin  writers  on  Epicureanism  Gains  Amafinius 

31 


EPICURUS 

(Tusculan  Disputations,  iv.  6)  and  Rabirius  (Academics, 
i.  5),  and  speaks  vaguely  of  their  being  followed  by 
many  others.  He  finds  much  fault  both  with  the 
literary  style  of  these  writers  and  with  the  want  of 
arrangement  in  their  works,  but  says  that  the  doctrine 
made  rapid  headway  owing  to  its  unscientific  character 
and  apparent  simplicity.  It  is  not  clear  whether  these 
Latin  prose  works  were  earlier  or  later  than  the  great 
poem  of  Lucretius.  Lucretius,  according  to  St.  Jerome, 
lived  from  94  to  53  B.C.,  wrote  his  poem  in  the 
intervals  of  an  insanity  brought  on  by  a  love-potion,  and 
ended  by  his  own  hand.  The  poem  was  polished  up 
by  Cicero.  A  comparison  with  Donatus's  Life  of  Virgil 
shows  that  Jerome's  dates  are  a  few  years  out,  and 
that  the  real  dates  for  the  poet's  birth  and  death 
should  probably  be  99/98 — 55  B.C.  The  meaning  of 
the  remark  about  Cicero  is  probably  that  Cicero 
edited  the  poem  for  circulation  after  the  author's 
death.  Munro  has  shown  that  the  Cicero  meant  is 
pretty  certainly  the  famous  Marcus,  and  the  fact  of 
his  connection  with  the  work  is  made  all  the  more 
likely  since  the  only  contemporary  allusion  to  it 
occurs  in  a  letter  from  Marcus  to  his  brother  Quintus, 
then  serving  on  Caesar's  staff  in  Britain  and  Gaul, 
written  early  in  the  year  54  (Epp.  ad  Quintum  Fratrem, 
ii.  11).  The  '  editing '  cannot  have  been  at  all  carefully 
done,  as  the  poem  is  notoriously  in  a  most  disjointed 
state.  According  to  the  manuscripts  Cicero  tells  his 
brother  that  it  is  a  work  exhibiting  both  genius  and  art 
32 


THE   LIFE   OF   EPICURUS 

(which  is,  in  fact,  the  case),  but  most  modern  editors 
make  him  underrate  the  poem  by  inserting  a  negative 
with  one  or  other  of  the  two  clauses.  The  influence  of 
Lucretius  on  the  poets  of  the  Augustan  age,  such  as 
Virgil,  Ovid,  Manilius,  belongs  to  the  history  of 
literature,  not  to  that  of  philosophy. 

To  the  same  general  period  as  Lucretius  belongs 
Philodemus  from  whom  so  many  fragments  have  been 
discovered  in  the  rolls  brought  from  Herculaneum,  and 
who  lived  under  the  protection  of  Cicero's  enemy 
L.  Calpurnius  Piso,  the  father-in-law  of  Caesar.  An- 
other well-known  Roman  Epicurean  is  Titus  Pomponius 
Atticus,  the  life-long  friend  and  correspondent  of 
Cicero.  Gaius  Cassius  Longinus,  the  real  author  of 
the  conspiracy  against  Caesar,  is  also  said  to  have 
belonged  to  the  sect,  to  which,  it  must  be  owned,  he 
did  no  credit.  Horace's  profession  of  Epicureanism  is 
well  known,  though  we  may  be  sure  that  his  interest 
in  the  system  was  confined  to  its  ethical  side.  A  later 
and  greater  writer  who,  without  being  a  member  of 
any  sect,  was  largely  in  sympathy  with  the  spirit  of 
the  Epicureans  and  shared  their  veneration  for 
Epicurus  as  the  deliverer  of  mankind  from  degrading 
superstition,  is  Lucian  of  Samosata  (second  century 
A.D.).  There  is  some  evidence  that  the  popularity  of 
the  doctrine  was  augmented  in  the  second  century  of 
our  era.  Plutarch  and  Galen,  in  this  century,  found 
it  worth  while  to  revive  the  polemic  against  Epicurus 
which  had  been  originated  in  his  own  lifetime  by 
c  33 


EPICURUS 

Plato's  Academy,  and  steadily  kept  up  until  it  took  a 
Latin  dress  in  the  ridicule  which  Cicero's  Academic 
and  Stoic  characters  are  made  to  pour  on  the  School  in 
his  philosophical  dialogues.  When  the  Emperor 
Marcus  endowed  the  chairs  of  Philosophy  at  Athens  at 
the  expense  of  the  state,  Epicureanism,  as  well  as 
Platonism,  Aristotelianism  and  Stoicism  figured  among 
the  state-supported  doctrines. 

Naturally  enough,  as  the  Christian  Church  became 
more  powerful  and  more  dogmatic,  it  found  itself  in 
violent  conflict  with  the  anti-theological  ideas  of 
Epicurus,  and  such  writers  as  Lactantius  (end  of  third 
century  A.D.)  made  him  a  special  object  of  invective, 
thereby  unconsciously  contributing  to  increase  our 
stock  of  Epicurean  fragments.  By  the  middle  of  the 
fourth  century  the  School  had  fallen  into  oblivion,  and 
the  Emperor  Julian  (reigned  360-363  A.D.)  congratu- 
lates himself  on  the  fact  that  most  even  of  their  books 
are  no  longer  in  circulation.  Towards  the  end  of 
the  century  St.  Augustine  declares  that  even  in  the 
pagan  schools  of  rhetoric  their  opinions  had  become 
wholly  forgotten.  (Epist.,  118,  21). 


34 


CHAPTER    II 

THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

1 .  Tlw  parts  of  Philosophy.  It  is  specially  character- 
istic of  Epicurus  that  his  conception  of  the  end  to  be 
aimed  at  by  Philosophy  is  narrowly  and  exclusively 
practical ;  in  fact,  his  School  might  be  named  not 
inaptly  the  Pragmatists  of  Antiquity.  As  Sextus 
Empiricus  puts  it  (adv.  Mathematicos,  xi.  169) :  '  Epicurus 
used  to  say  that  Philosophy  is  an  activity  which  by 
means  of  reasoning  and  discussion  produces  a  happy 
life.'  And  we  have  a  saying  of  Epicurus  himself  that 
'  we  must  not  make  a  mere  pretence  of  Philosophy, 
but  must  be  real  philosophers,  just  as  we  need  not  the 
pretence  but  the  reality  of  health.'  And  again,  'The 
discourse  of  philosophers  by  whom  none  of  our  passions 
are  healed  is  but  idle.  Just  as  medicine  is  useless 
unless  it  expels  disease  from  the  body,  so  Philosophy 
is  useless  unless  it  expels  passion  from  the  soul.'  In 
this  conception  of  the  philosopher  as  the  healer  of  the 
sick  soul,  and  of  Philosophy  as  the  medicine  he 
employs,  Epicurus  is,  of  course,  saying  no  new  thing. 
The  thought  that  the  work  of  Philosophy  is  to  produce 
health  of  soul,  and  that  virtue  is  to  the  soul  what 

35 


EPICURUS 

health  is  to  the  body,  goes  back  in  the  last  resort  to 
the  Pythagorean  medical  men  of  Magna  Graecia,  and 
is,  for  the  attentive  student,  the  key  to  the  whole 
moral  doctrine  of  Plato  and  Aristotle.  Where 
Epicurus  is  at  variance  with  Plato  and  Aristotle  is  in 
holding  that  mental  enlightenment,  the  understanding 
of  things  as  they  truly  are,  is  not  itself  an  integral 
part  of  'salvation,'  or  the  'soul's  health,' but  a  mere 
means  to  it.  Hence  he  sets  no  store  on  science  except 
as  a  means  to  something  beyond  itself.  He  despises 
history,  mathematics,  and  literary  cultivation  on  the 
ground  that  they  do  not  bear  upon  conduct.  In  an 
extant  fragment  of  a  letter  he  says,  with  a  heated  out- 
burst of  language,  '  For  God's  sake,  crowd  on  sail  and 
flee  from  all  "culture"'  (Usener,  Fr.  163);  and  in 
another,  'I  congratulate  you  on  having  come  to 
Philosophy  undefiled  by  any  "culture"'  (Fr.  117). 
Epicurus  is  constantly  attacked  by  his  later  critics  for 
this  contempt  of  polite  education,  but  he  may,  of  course, 
mean  no  more  than  that  his  mission  is  not  only  to  the 
wise  and  prudent,  but  to  all  who  fear  and  suffer. 
There  is  to  be  a  place  in  his  scheme  for  the  homely  and 
humble,  the  babes  and  sucklings,  as  well  as  for  the 
wise  in  the  wisdom  of  this  world. 

The  only  science  to  which  he  attaches  any  value  is 
Physics  (<£wio  /Voyi'a,  the  general  theory  of  the  consti- 
tution of  the  universe),  and  he  values  Physics  simply 
for  its  moral  effect.  By  giving  a  purely  naturalistic 
theory  of  the  world,  Physics  frees  us  from  all  belief  in 
36 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

the  agency  of  God  or  the  gods,  and  thus  delivers  us 
from  the  dread  of  God's  judgments,  and  from  anxious 
striving  to  win  His  favour.  By  proving  the  mortality 
of  the  soul  it  sets  us  free  from  superstitious  terror 
about  the  unknown  future.  By  teaching  us  to  dis- 
tinguish between  what  is  necessary  to  support  our 
health  and  what  is  superfluous,  it  teaches  us  to  limit 
our  desires  to  things  convenient  for  us,  and  emancipates 
us  from  bondage  to  the  lust  of  the  eye  and  the  pride  of 
life.  But  for  these  services,  Physics  would  have  no 
worth.  As  Epicurus  himself  puts  it  in  §  10  of  his 
Catechism  :  '  If  our  apprehensions  about  appearances  in 
the  heavens,  and  about  death  and  its  possible  conse- 
quences, and  also  our  ignorance  of  the  limits  of  pain 
and  desire,  gave  us  no  uneasiness,  AVC  should  have  had 
no  need  of  a  science  of  nature.'  Similarly  Lucretius 
explains  that  the  whole  object  of  his  poem  is  to  show 
that  the  world  has  been  produced  without  divine 
agency  (opera  sine  divom),  and  that  there  is  no  pain  to  be 
feared  after  death.  Science  is,  in  fact,  valuable  solely 
because  it  banishes  God  from  the  world,  and  proves 
the  mortality  of  the  soul,  and  so,  as  Lucretius  puts  it, 
'religion — the  vague  dread  of  the  unknown — is  put 
under  foot  and  man  brought  level  with  heaven.' 

Hence,  along  with  all  speculative  science,  Epicurus 
professed  to  reject  as  useless  the  syllogistic  Logic  of  the 
Academy  and  Aristotle.  Of  the  three  divisions  of 
Philosophy  as  fixed  by  Xenocrates,  Logic,  Physics, 
Ethics,  the  doctrines  of  discourse,  of  nature,  of  conduct, 

37 


EPICURUS 

Epicurus  dispenses  wholly  with  the  first,  and  retains  the 
second  simply  as  a  necessary  introduction  to  the  third. 
Still,  of  course,  though  agreeing  with  our  modern 
empiricists  in  the  rejection  of  formal  deductive  Logic, 
he  requires  some  doctrine  of  method,  some  theory  of 
the  way  in  which  true  generalisations  may  be  obtained, 
and  some  standard  of  truth  and  falsehood.  To  meet 
this  need,  Epicurus  and  his  followers  tried  to  lay  down 
rules  of  what  we  should  call  inductive  Logic,  rules 
showing  how  a  true  inference  may  be  drawn  from  the 
data  of  sense-perception.  This  rudimentary  theory  of 
induction  they  called  Canonics,  the  doctrine  of  the 
KO.VWV  or  rule  by  which  inferences  may  be  drawn  from 
particular  observations.  Hence,  finally,  the  school 
divided  Philosophy  into  three  parts,  Canonics,  Physics, 
Ethics,  of  which  the  two  former  are  only  valuable 
because  they  are  requisite  for  the  last.  This  is  what 
Seneca  means  when  he  says  (Ep.t  89.  11),  'the 
Epicureans  hold  that  there  are  two  parts  of  Philosophy, 
the  Natural  and  the  Moral,  but  reject  the  Rational 
part  [i.e.  Formal  Logic,  the  doctrine  of  syllogism].  But 
since  they  were  forced  by  the  nature  of  things  to 
remove  ambiguities,  and  to  detect  falsities  concealed 
under  an  appearance  of  truth,  they  too  introduce  a 
branch  of  study  which  they  call  the  doctrine  of 
judgment,  and  its  standard  (de  iudicio  d  regula=Trepl 
TOV  /cavovos),  which  is  the  rational  part  of  Philosophy 
under  another  name.  But  they  regard  this  as  a  mere 
complement  of  Natural  Philosophy.' 

38 


2.  Canonics — the  Rules  of  Philosophising.  The  Epicu- 
rean doctrine  of  the  KO.VMV  or  rule  of  generalisation  is 
so  crude  that  one  would  not  naturally  expect  it  to 
exhibit  signs  of  having  been  borrowed  from  a  foreign 
source.  Yet  here,  as  everywhere  in  Epicurus,  we 
come  on  signs  of  indebtedness  to  others  for  the  views 
on  which  he  plumed  himself.  We  have  already 
read  in  the  Life  by  Diogenes  that  Antigonus  of 
Carystus  regarded  the  whole  doctrine  of  the  Canon 
as  a  plagiarism  from  Nausiphanes.  Now  the  fact  that 
before  Epicurus  set  up  for  himself  as  an  independent 
philosopher  he  had  been  a  pupil  of  Nausiphanes  may 
be  regarded  as  certain,  since  the  statement  comes  to  us 
on  the  double  authority  of  Antigonus  and  Apollodorus, 
the  latter  of  whom  may  fairly  be  taken  as  representing 
Eratosthenes.  From  the  frequent  recurrence  of  it  in 
writers  like  Cicero  and  Plutarch  we  may  infer  that 
the  later  Epicureans  were  unable  to  deny  it,  and  the 
extreme  scurrility  with  which  Epicurus  himself  spoke 
of  Nausiphanes  as  a  person  who  claimed  to  have 
taught  him  his  Philosophy  is  enough  to  show  that  he 
had  at  some  time  stood  in  a  relation  of  dependence  on 
the  former  which  he  wished  afterwards  to  disguise. 
We  have  further  the  warrant  of  two  of  Epicurus'  chief 
friends,  Leonteus  and  Metrodorus,  for  the  positive 
statement  that  Epicurus  originally  called  himself  a 
Democritean  (Plutarch  Against  Colotes,  3),  though  he 
afterwards  reviled  Democritus  with  his  usual  coarse- 
ness. When  we  come  to  deal  with  the  Epicurean 

39 


EPICURUS 

doctrine  of  atoms  we  shall  see  that  these  statements 
must  in  the  main  be  true;  Epicurean  Atomism  is 
unintelligible  except  as  a  clumsy  attempt  on  the  part 
of  an  incoherent  thinker  to  adapt  the  general  physical 
doctrine  of  Democritus  to  views  which  had  been  made 
current  in  Athens  by  Aristotle,  which  are  really  incom- 
patible with  it.  Nausiphanes,  of  whom  we  know  that 
he  combined  the  physics  of  Democritus  with  the 
ethical  agnosticism  of  Pyrrho,  thus  appears  as  the 
indispensable  link  of  connection  between  Epicurus  and 
the  early  science  of  Ionia,  and  we  may  see  reason  to 
think  that  there  may  be  a  great  deal  of  truth  in  a 
statement  made  by  Sextus  Empiricus  about  the  origin 
of  Epicurus'  blind  hatred  of  mathematics.  It  was  due, 
Sextus  says,  to  his  'animosity  against  Nausiphanes, 
the  disciple  of  Pyrrho,  who  had  a  large  following  of 
younger  men,  and  made  serious  studies  of  mathematics, 
and  even  more  specially  of  rhetoric.  Epicurus  had 
been  his  pupil,  but  from  a  desire  to  be  thought  a  self- 
taught  philosopher  of  original  genius  did  his  best  to 
deny  the  fact.  He  was  anxious  to  obliterate  the 
reputation  of  Nausiphanes,  and  so  volubly  denounces 
the  mathematical  studies  in  which  the  latter  enjoyed 
great  renown'  (adv.  Matkematicos,  i.  2).  Sextus  then 
goes  on  to  quote  the  abusive  letter  to  '  the  philosophers 
of  Mytilene,'  in  which  Epicurus  nicknames  Nausiphanes 
'  the  Mollusc,'  and  winds  up  by  saying  that  '  he  was  a 
worthless  fellow  and  devoted  to  pursuits  from  which 
one  cannot  possibly  arrive  at  wisdom ' ;  by  which,  says 
40 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

Sextus,  he  means  mathematics.  Some  information 
about  the  contents  of  the  work  called  the  Tripod  has 
been  preserved  in  Philodemus  On  Rhetoric.  Most  of 
what  Philodemus  has  to  say  is  very  vague,  but  we  can 
make  out  quite  clearly  that  Nausiphanes  was  anxious 
to  show  that  the  combination  of  an  eloquent  and 
attractive  style  with  mathematical  and  physical 
research  is  both  feasible  and  desirable.  He  aims,  in 
fact,  at  such  a  combination  of  these  qualities  as  we  see 
in  a  man  like  W.  K.  Clifford,  who  united  high  mathe- 
matical gifts  with  the  ability  to  make  the  general 
results  of  abstruse  research  intelligible  and  attractive 
to  the  ordinary  man  of  average  education.  It  is 
strongly  corroborative  of  the  assertions  of  Antigonus 
and  Apollodorus  that  we  find  Nausiphanes  employing 
the  very  term  which  was  afterwards  used  by  Epicurus 
as  the  technical  word  for  '  inductive  generalisation ' 
(eVtAoyio-TiJo)  Netopia = induction  from  the  known  facts 
of  sense,  the  Epicurean  eTriAoyur/ios).1  It  has  even  been 
suggested  that  Nausiphanes  had  anticipated  Aristotle 
in  appropriating  the  word  '  syllogism,'  the  casting  up 
of  an  account,  computation  of  a  sum  total,  in  the 

1  See  the  full  text  of  the  relevant  passages  of  Philodemus  in 
Diels,  Fragmente  dcr  Vorsokratiker,  i.  4C4-465.  As  to  dates, 
Nausiphanes  is  regularly  said  to  have  '  heard' Democritus  in 
person.  If  this  is  true  he  must  have  been  at  least  some  years 
older  than  Aristotle  (born  384  B.C.),  since  Democritus  was 
certainly  born  about  460,  and  even  if  he  lived,  as  tradition 
asserts,  to  over  a  hundred,  he  can  hardly  have  been  actively 
teaching  in  the  last  decades  of  his  life. 

41 


EPICURUS 

technical  logical  sense,  but  in  the  absence  of  precise 
dates  it  would  be  rash  to  be  dogmatic  on  the  point. 
It  is  equally  possible  that  the  word  came  to  both 
Aristotle  and  Nausiphanes  from  the  Platonic  Academy. 
For  the  present  we  had  better  confine  ourselves  to  the 
statement  that  the  Epicurean  theory  of  knowledge 
probably  comes  from  the  same  source  as  the  Epicurean 
borrowings  from  the  Physics  and  Ethics  of  Democritus, 
viz.,  Nausiphanes.  We  shall  see,  as  we  go  on,  that 
the  theory  is  not  that  of  Democritus,  and  is  really 
inconsistent  with  physical  Atomism. 

Epicurus  starts  then,  just  like  a  modern  empiricist, 
with  the  unproved  assertion  that  all  our  knowledge 
and  all  our  concepts  are  derived  solely  from  sensation. 
'  Whatever  we  cognize,'  so  Cicero  expresses  the  doctrine 
in  De  Finibus,  i.  64,  'has  its  origin  in  the  senses.' 
Epicurus  himself  says  in  §  23  of  the  Catechism,  that 
unqualified  scepticism  about  the  veracity  of  sensation 
is  self-destructive.  '  If  you  attack  all  sensations  you 
will  have  no  standard  left  by  which  to  condemn  those 
of  them  which  you  pronounce  false.'  Thus,  be  it 
noted,  he  supposes  it  conceded  that  some  sensations  at 
least  are  veridical,  the  very  point  which  the  theory  of 
Democritus  had  quite  consistently  denied.  Since  the 
atomic  theory,  which  Democritus  regards  as  absolutely 
true,  is  obviously  at  variance  with  the  testimony  of  the 
senses,  Democritus  had  drawn  the  conclusion  that  it  is 
only  reflection  or  reasoning,  never  sensation,  which 
apprehends  things  as  they  really  are.  No  thing  really 
42 


THE    NATURE    OF   REALITY 

has  the  character  which  it  seems  to  our  senses  to  have, 
and  the  fundamental  proposition  of  a  true  theory  of 
knowledge  is  that  sensation  is  inherently  misleading. 
'There  are  two  types  of  cognition,  the  one  genuine, 
the  other  bastard.  To  the  bastard  kind  belong  all 
such  things  as  sight,  hearing,  smell,  taste,  touch ;  but 
the  genuine  is  separate  from  it'  (Sextus  Empiricus, 
adv.  Math.,  vii.  135,  who  explains  rightly  that  the 
contrast  is  between  sensation  and  'understanding').1 
Some  such  view  is,  of  course,  indispensable  to  any 
Philosophy  which  holds  that  the  physical  world  con- 
sists simply  of  atoms  in  motion,  and  the  rejection  of 
it  by  Epicurus  is  only  a  sign  of  his  entire  lack  of 
intellectual  thoroughness. 

All  knowledge  then  begins  with,  and  can  be  analysed 
back  into,  actual  sensations.  And  Epicurus  is  as 
confident  as  Locke  that  sensation  always  has  a  real 
external  object,  and  is  not  a  mere  subjective  affection 
of  our  mind  or  our  nervous  system.  Unlike  Locke, 
he  goes  so  far  as  to  hold  that  sensation  not  only  has 
such  an  object,  but  that  it  always  represents  its  object 
exactly  as  it  really  is  :  '  it  is  a  property  of  sensation 

1  Democritus,  Fr.  11  (Diels).  The  names  for  the  two  kinds 
of  cognition  are  yv-^alrj  (legitimate),  ffKorir)  (lit.  '  dark ').  I 
assume  that  ffKorirj  here  is  used  metaphorically  in  the  sense  of 
'bastard,'  'begotten  under  the  cover  of  secrecy,'  as  in  the 
common  tragic  periphrases  cub-nov  \t\os,  Kpii^tov  X^x°*  for 
'  concubine.'  So  Diels  renders  the  word  by  unecht,  'spurious.' 
I  find  that  the  right  rendering  has  also  already  been  given  by 
Professor  Burnet  and  others. 

43 


EPICURUS 

alone  to  apprehend  the  present  object  which  arouses 
it'  (Fr.  247).  Or  more  precisely,  to  quote  Sextus 
again,  '  Sensation,  because  it  apprehends  the  objects 
which  fall  under  it  without  subtraction,  addition,  or 
transposition,  since  it  is  irrational,  is  always  completely 
true,  and  apprehends  existence  as  it  veritably  is' 
(op.  tit.  viii.  9).  Sensations  were  therefore  called 
ej/apycicu,  'clear  and  evident'  cognitions,  and  it  was 
maintained  that  even  the  sensations  of  dreamers  and 
lunatics  are  strictly  veridical,  because  they  are  '  changes 
in  consciousness,'  and  a  change  must  always  have  a 
real  cause  (Fr.  63).  We  see,  then,  that  Epicurus,  like 
Locke,  holds  that  there  is  an  indefinable  something 
about  every  actual  sensation  which  distinguishes  it 
from  any  other  mode  of  being  conscious,  such  as  memory 
or  imagination ;  you  cannot  say  what  this  difference 
consists  in,  but  you  directly  feel  it;  every  sensation 
carries  with  it  the  stamp  of  its  own  '  reality.'  It  is 
interesting  to  observe  the  reason  given  for  the  view 
that  sensation  always  has  an  external  object.  The 
argument  is  that  the  sensation  is  always  caused  by 
some  thing.  Leaving  on  one  side  the  question  of  fact 
raised  by  some  modern  psychologists  as  to  the  existence 
of  '  centrally  initiated  sensations,'  we  see  at  once  that 
Epicurus  is  thus  attempting  to  guarantee  the  objec- 
tivity of  sense-qualities  by  appealing  to  a  universal  law 
of  causation.  This  is  quite  inconsistent  with  his 
empiricist  starting-point,  but  the  inconsistency  is  one 
in  which  he  has  inevitably  been  followed  by  all  later 

44 


THE   NATURE    OF    REALITY 

empiricists.  We  see  also  that  he  falls  into  the  very 
common  error  of  confusing  the  objects  perceived  by 
the  senses  with  the  physical  stimuli  which  arouse 
sensation,  (like  modern  writers  who  talk  of  the  eye  as 
perceiving  light-waves,  forgetting  that  what  we  per- 
ceive is  not  vibrations  but  colours). 

To  the  question  why  he  holds  that  sensation  not 
only  has  an  external  existing  cause,  but  always  per- 
ceives that  cause  just  as  it  is,  Epicurus  replies  that 
a  sensation  is  aXoyov  n,  non-rational,  and  therefore 
neither  adds  to,  takes  away  from,  nor  transposes  the 
parts  of  its  object,  since  all  these  are  operations  of 
the  reflective  understanding.  Hence  the  very  non- 
rational  character  of  sensation  becomes  a  guarantee 
of  its  fidelity  as  a  record  of  external  fact.  Hence 
Epicurus,  thanks  to  his  indifference  to  the  theory  of 
knowledge,  cannot  like  Locke  distinguish  between  the 
primary  sensations  and  the  secondary,  and  does  not 
even  appear  to  see  that  there  is  any  problem  involved, 
though  one  would  have  thought  that  his  adherence  to 
Atomism  must  have  forced  the  question  on  his  notice. 

For  the  full  explanation  of  the  theory  that  sensation 
is  always  unerring  we  need  for  a  moment  to  anticipate 
our  account  of  the  Epicurean  Physics.  The  explana- 
tion turns  on  a  distinction  between  the  immediate 
and  the  mediate  object  in  sense- perception.  When  a 
distant  tower  which  is  really  square  appears  round, 
have  we  not  an  illusion  of  sight  ?  Epicurus  says  no ; 
there  is  only  a  fallacy  of  inference.  The  square  tower 
45 


EPICURUS 

throws  off  a  series  of  images,  or  atomic  skins  from  its 
surface.     These  images  are  originally  square  also,  but 
being  material,  like  the  tower  itself,  they  clash  with 
other  bodies  as  they  travel  from  the  tower  towards 
the  eye,  and  thus  get  their  angles  rounded  off.     What 
we  actually  perceive,  the  inner  or  immediate  object 
as  we  might  call  it,  is  one  of  these  '  skins,'  and  this 
has   become  round  before  it   strikes  on  the  sensory 
organ,  and  is  therefore  perceived  exactly  as  it  is.     The 
error  lies  simply  in  the  judgment  that   the  mediate 
object,  the  body  from  which  the  '  skin '  was  thrown 
off,  is  round  too,  and  so  the  fallacy  belongs  entirely  to 
reason  and  not  to  sense.     This  explains  also  what  was 
meant  by  saying  that  the  sensations  of  a  dreamer  or  a 
lunatic  are  veridical.     Like  all  sensations,  they  have  a 
cause  external  to  the  percipient,  and  this  cause  is,  as 
always,  a  '  skin '  composed  of  atoms.     The  dreamer  or 
lunatic  apprehends  this  '  skin '  just  as  it  is  when  it  acts 
on  his  sensory  system,  and  his  sensation  is  therefore 
'  true ' ;  his  error  lies  in  the  inference  he  makes  as  to 
the  body  from  which  the  'skin'  has  been  projected. 
For  example,  some  of  the  'skins'   may   never   have 
been  thrown  off  from  any  single  actual  body  at  all. 
They  may  be  accidental    agglomerations    of    atoms 
originally  coming  from  different  sources,  formed  in  the 
process  of  transit  through  the  intervening  space,  e.g. 
the  images  of  a  three-headed  giant  or  of  a  centaur.     If 
the  madman  takes  these  for  'skins'  thrown  off  from 
real  bodies  of  giants  or  centaurs,  he  commits  a  fallacy 
46 


THE    NATURE    OF    REALITY 

of  inference.  Hence  it  is  essential  to  the  theory  to 
distinguish  very  sharply  between  actual  sensation  and 
its  reproduction  in  memory  or  imagination,  which  may 
be  distorted  by  such  fallacies  to  any  extent.  (See 
Epicurus'  own  words  in  Fr.  36.)  Unfortunately 
Epicurus  gives  us  no  rule  by  which  to  make  the 
distinction. 

The  next  step  taken  by  Epicurus  is  to  explain  the 
nature  of  what  he  calls  a  TrpoXv) i/as,  or  pre-notion.  By 
this  he  means  the  general  notion  or  concept  of  a  class 
of  things.  He  takes  it,  precisely  in  the  fashion  of 
Huxley,  to  be  the  same  thing  as  a  mental  '  composite 
photograph,'  resulting  from  the  blending  into  one 
memory-image  of  a  number  of  residues  of  individual 
sensations.  '  All  our  concepts,'  he  says  (Fr.  36),  '  have 
been  derived  from  sensations  by  contiguity,  analogy, 
similarity,  and  composition,  reasoning  also  contribut- 
ing to  the  result.'  His  view  then,  like  that  of  our 
Associationists,  is  clearly  that  perception  of  concrete 
things  begins  with  an  association  in  thought  of  sense- 
qualities  which  have  been  presented  together.  Further 
association  by  similarity,  whether  of  relations  or  of 
qualities,  as  well  as  conscious  combination  in  accord 
with  what  we  should  call  some  category  or  principle 
of  order,  supervenes,  and  so,  in  the  end,  out  of  a 
number  of  individual  sensations,  occurring  at  different 
times  and  having  individual  qualitative  differences,  is 
formed  a  general  or  typical  image,  not  corresponding 
exactly  to  any  one  presented  object,  but  representing 

47 


EPICURUS 

the  features  in  which  the  members  of  a  kindred  group 
of  objects  are  alike.  (I  seem  to  trace  in  this  account 
a  psychologically  crude  reproduction  of  Aristotle's 
account  of  the  way  in  which  '  many  memories  of  the 
same  thing'  give  rise  to  a  single  experience.)  This 
'generic  image'  is  what  Epicurus  calls  a  TrpoAij^is  or 
pre-notion  and  defines  as  '  a  true  conception,  or  belief, 
or  general  notion  stored  up  in  the  mind,  that  is,  the 
recollection  of  what  has  frequently  been  presented 
from  without;  for  as  soon  as  the  word  "man"  is 
uttered,  we  think  by  a  "pre-notion  "  of  the  generic  type 
of  "  man,"  our  sensations  being  the  origin  from  which 
this  is  derived'  (Diogenes,  x.  33).  Now  Epicurus 
demands  of  a  correctly-formed  '  pre-notion,'  just  as  he 
did  of  sensation,  that  it  shall  be  ivapyis,  'clear  and 
distinct';  and  by  this  he  means  not  that  it  shall  be 
logically  well-defined,  but  that  we  shall  have  a  clear-cut 
picture  of  it  before  the  imagination.  Hence,  like 
Berkeley,  he  holds  that  if  words  are  to  have  a  mean- 
ing, the  simple  and  primary  senses  of  them  must  repre- 
sent perfectly  definite  mental  pictures.  The  primary 
meaning  of  a  name  is  always  '  clear  and  distinct ' ;  we 
never  could  apply  a  significant  name  to  anything,  if 
we  had  not  first  become  acquainted  with  the  type  or 
class  to  which  the  thing  belongs  by  a  'pre-notion.' 
Hence  '  pre-notions '  are  all '  clear  and  distinct.'  Clearly 
we  have  here  a  theory  of  the  formation  of  concepts 
which  is  virtually  that  commonly  ascribed  to  Locke, 
except  that  Epicurus  actually  believes  the  processes  of 
48 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

association  and  combination  of  which  he  speaks  to  be 
quite  literally  actions  of  a  material  thing  (a  complex 
of  atoms  which  has  made  its  way  into  the  organism 
through  the  sense-organs),  on  a  second  material  thing, 
— the  so-called  soul.  We  have  also  the  same  confusion 
which  besets  the  modern  psychologising  empiricists 
between  a  logically  universal  concept  and  a  mental 
'composite  photograph'  which  leads  to  the  error  of 
supposing  that  what  cannot  be  pictured  cannot  be 
well  defined.  In  fact  it  is  often  just  the  things  which 
are  hardest  to  picture  which  can  be  most  readily 
defined  for  the  understanding.  Thus  in  arithmetic  a 
'rational  number,' in  geometry  a  curve  which  passes 
through  all  the  points  of  a  given  area,  are  notions 
which  are  clear  and  distinct  for  the  understanding, 
since  we  know  exactly  what  we  mean  by  them,  but 
they  can  be  imagined,  if  at  all,  only  in  the  vaguest 
way.  Or  again,  I  may  know  perfectly  well  what  the  law 
means  by  'wilful  murder,'  but  the  mental  picture  which 
I  form  on  hearing  the  words  may  be  absurdly  sketchy 
and  indistinct,  or  I  may  even  form  no  picture  at  all. 

We  see  now  what  the  Epicurean  standard  of 
'  reality '  or  '  truth '  will  be  in  the  case  of  the  sensation 
and  the  general  notion.  The  individual  sensation 
carries  an  assurance  of  objective  reality  with  it  in 
an  indescribable  way;  we  feel  that  it  is  real,  just  as 
Locke  says  that  we  have  an  immediate  feeling  of  the 
difference  between  actually  being  in  the  fire  and 
merely  imagining  ourselves  there.  And  Epicurus 
D  49 


EPICURUS 

goes  on  to  argue  that  if  you  have  apparently  conflict- 
ing sensations,  you  must  not  deny  the  reality  of  either. 
One  sensation  cannot  prove  the  falsity  of  another  of 
the  same  kind,  for  both  have  exactly  the  same  evidence 
for  them,  nor  can  the  truthfulness  of  a  sensation  be 
disproved  by  an  appeal  to  those  of  a  different  sense, 
since  the  objects  apprehended  by  the  different  senses 
are  disparate.  (This  seems  meant  to  exclude,  e.g. 
the  correction  of  a  visual  judgment  of  form  by  appeal 
to  experiences  of  touch.  Presumably  both  experiences 
are  regarded  as  equally  '  real,'  but  as  concerned  with 
different  immediate  objects.)  Nor  can  you  be  argued 
out  of  your  sensations  by  reasoning,  since  all  reasoning 
is  founded  on  sensation  (Fr.  36). 

So  in  the  case  of  the  'pre-notion,'  its  objectivity, 
like  that  of  the  sensations  from  which  it  is  com- 
pounded, is  supposed  to  be  shown  by  its  possessing, 
like  them,  an  irresistible  '  clearness  and  distinctness  '  ; 
it  is  clear-cut  and  definite  and,  as  Hume  would  say, 
strikes  the  mind  with  a  peculiar  force  and  liveliness, 
and  it  is  this  liveliness  which  guarantees  that  it  is 
objectively  'true'  —  i.e.  based  on  genuine  sensation. 
Similarly  with  feeling  in  the  modern  sense  ;  pleasures 
are  held  to  carry  in  themselves  the  stamp  of  their  own 
reality  (see  Fr.  260).  Hence  the  summary  statement 
of  the  doxographers  that  'according  to  Epicurus  the 
"  criteria  "  are  sensations,  pre-notions,  and  feelings  ' 


But  now,  to  come  to  what  is  the  fundamental  point 
50 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

in  the  whole  theory,  what  is  the  standard  of  '  reality 
or  '  truth  '  in  opinions,  i.e.  in  beliefs  or  judgments  ? 
(It  is  really  only  in  relation  to  beliefs  that  we  can 
rationally  ask  for  such  a  standard ;  there  is  no  sense 
in  calling  a  sensation  or  a  generic  image,  as  distinct 
from  a  belief  about  it,  true  or  false  at  all.)  It  cannot,  of 
course,  be  maintained  that  all  beliefs  are  true.  Some 
of  them  are  certainly  false ;  but  is  there  any  means  of 
knowing  the  false  beliefs  from  the  true  1  Epicurus  says 
'  if  a  belief  is  witnessed  to,  or  at  least  not  witnessed 
against  by  our  clear  and  evident  perceptions,  it  is  true  ; 
if  it  is  witnessed  against,  or  not  witnessed  to,  it  is  false ' 
(Fr.  247).  Or,  in  other  words,  a  belief  is  true  when  it 
is  confirmed  by  the  evidence  of  the  senses,  false  when 
it  is  contradicted  by  that  evidence ;  where  there  is 
neither  confirmation  nor  contradiction,  the  belief  may 
be  true  or  may  be  false.  This  is,  to  be  sure,  the  view 
regularly  taken  by  pure  empiricists  as  to  the  conditions 
under  which  a  scientific  hypothesis  may  be  regarded 
as  established.  It  is  established  when  its  consequences 
are  found  to  be  verified  by  sense-experience,  confuted 
when  they  are  found  to  be  in  conflict  with  sense- 
experience.  The  point  is  of  special  moment  for 
Epicurus  because,  with  all  the  sensationalism  of  his 
theory  of  cognition,  his  Physics  are  entirely  built  on 
a  doctrine  about  certain  things  (the  atoms  and  the 
empty  space  in  which  they  move),  which  admittedly 
cannot  be  perceived  at  all.  How  then  can  we  have 
any  test  of  its  truth  ?  The  Epicurean  answer  to 
51 


EPICURUS 

this  question  is  quite  different  from  that  given  by 
Democritus.  Democritus,  as  we  saw,  regarded  sense- 
perception  as  inherently  illusory;  consequently  he 
makes  no  attempt  whatever  to  appeal  to  the  senses  in 
support  of  the  atomic  theory.  With  him,  as  with  his 
predecessor  Leucippus,  the  doctrine  is  put  forward  as  a 
metaphysical  deduction  from  the  two  premisses  (1)  What 
is  is  immutable ;  (2)  motion  is  a  fact.  The  immediate 
conclusion  from  these  premisses  is  that  what  is  con- 
sists of  absolutely  unchanging  units  moving  about, 
approaching,  and  receding,  in  empty  space.  Epicurus 
is  bound,  on  the  other  hand,  to  achieve  the  impossible 
task  of  showing  that  Atomism  is  compatible  with  the 
view  that  our  sensations  are  the  criteria  of  reality. 
'We  must  draw  our  inferences,'  he  says,'  'from  the 
perceptible  to  the  imperceptible'  (Fr.  36).  What  he 
urges  is,  in  effect,  that  the  doctrine  of  atoms  is 
established  if  it  leads  to  a  conception  of  the  world 
conformable  to  our  sense-experience,  and  if  the  pro- 
perties and  motions  we  suppose  in  the  atoms  are 
analogous  with  our  sense-experience  of  those  of  per- 
ceptible things.  But  here  a  difficulty  at  once  arises. 
The  atomic  hypothesis  of  the  world's  structure  might 
not  be  the  only  one  which  would  yield  results  con- 
sonant with  sense-experience ;  a  plurality  of  different 
theories  might  all  be  '  witnessed  to,  or  not  witnessed 
against,  by  our  senses.'  Why  then  should  we  give 
any  one  of  them  a  preference  over  any  other  ?  It  is 
clearly  with  a  view  to  this  difficulty  that  Epicurus  puts 
52 


THE   NATURE   OF    REALITY 

forward  a  theory  in  which  he  anticipates  both  Hobbes 
and — may  we  not  say  ? — our  modern  Pragmatists. 
Two  inconsistent  explanations  of  the  same  fact  may  be 
equally  true  and  equally  valuable,  if  either  would  yield 
results  conformable  with  sense-experience.  Now  the 
sole  utility  of  the  study  of  Physics  was  to  lie  in  its 
power  to  produce  serenity  of  mind  by  expelling  the 
fear  of  a  judgment  after  death  and  the  belief  in 
Divine  control  of  the  course  of  events.  Hence  if 
there  are  several  theories  about  the  cause  of  a  natural 
event  which  all  agree  in  being  purely  naturalistic, 
and  if  the  result  would  equally  occur  on  any  one  of 
these  suppositions,  Epicurus  teaches  that  any  one  of 
them  is  as  good  as  any  other,  and  we  have  no  reason 
to  decide  between  them,  since  the  practical  con- 
sequences for  life  are  the  same.  Thus,  while  certain 
theories  are  laid  down  as  absolutely  true,  e.g.  the 
doctrine  of  Atoms  (on  the  ground  that  they  are 
requisite  for  any  purely  mechanical  theory  of  nature), 
alternative  causes  are  assigned  for  most  of  the  special 
phenomena.  This  comes  out  repeatedly  in  the  epitome 
of  the  work  on  Physics  which  forms  the  so-called 
second  'letter'  given  by  Diogenes.  We  are  there 
told  that  appearances  in  the  heavens  are  capable  of  a 
plurality  of  different  explanations  all  equally  accordant 
with  sense-perception,  and  we  must  not  prefer  one  of 
these  to  another.  '  For  Philosophy  should  not  proceed 
in  accord  with  empty  dogmas  and  postulates  but  only  as 
actual  appearances  demand.  For  what  life  requires  is 

53 


EPICUKUS 

not  unreason  and  idle  opinion,  but  a  tranquil  exist- 
ence' ([Ep.]  ii.  3 ;  Usener,  p.  36).  Thus  Epicurus  not 
merely  says  what  is  true  enough,  that  in  our  present 
state  of  knowledge  ascertained  facts  may  often  be 
accounted  for  on  rival  hypotheses ;  he  actually  forbids 
the  extension  of  science  by  the  devising  of  experiments 
to  reduce  the  number  of  possible  explanations.  Any 
explanation  will  do,  if  it  only  excludes  Divine  agency. 
We  may  fairly  say,  then,  that  what  recommends  the 
atomic  theory  to  Epicurus  is  not  its  scientific  advan- 
tages, but  its  utility  as  a  means  of  getting  rid  of 
Theism.  And  we  must  further  note  that  his  reason 
for  wishing  to  banish  theistic  hypotheses  from  science 
is  not  the  legitimate  one  that  as  descriptions  of  how 
events  succeed  one  another  they  leave  us  just  where 
they  found  us,  but  the  illegitimate  one  that  he 
personally  dislikes  the  thought  of  a  God  whose 
judgments  may  possibly  have  to  be  reckoned  with 
hereafter. 

Whether  Epicurus  devised  for  himself  the  singular 
combination  of  two  such  incompatibles  as  Democritean 
Atomism  and  absolute  sensationalism  or  borrowed  it 
from  Nausiphanes  there  appears  to  be  nothing  to  show, 
unless  we  may  regard  the  evidence  of  Philodemus, 
which  proves  that  Nausiphanes  had  been  interested  in 
the  inductive  problem  of  inferring  the  unperceived 
from  the  perceived,  as  an  indication  of  borrowing. 
Such  a  problem  could  hardly  have  appealed  to  a 
disciple  of  Democritus  unless  he  had  entered  on  the 

54 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

path  of  trying  to  combine  his  master's  Physics  with 
sensationalism.  Hence  it  may  well  be  that  Epicurus  is 
as  unoriginal  here  as  he  shows  himself  everywhere  else. 
We  may  also  note  that  the  Epicurean  doctrine  of 
the  criterion,  taken  as  it  stands,  is  quite  inconsistent 
with  the  rejection  of  Formal  Logic.  Before  we  can  say 
whether  the  results  which  'follow  from'  an  hypothesis  are 
1  confirmed  by  sense-experience,'  we  must  know  what 
results  do  follow  and  what  do  not,  and  how  are  we  to 
know  this  without  any  doctrine  of  deductive  Logic1? 
How  can  we  tell  whether  we  are  reasoning  rightly  or 
wrongly  from  the  perceptible  to  the  imperceptible 
without  some  doctrine  of  the  conditions  under  which 
generalisation  is  sound  1  Later  Epicureans  appear  to 
have  tried  to  fill  the  gap  left  at  this  point  by  Epicurus. 
Among  the  remains  of  Philodemus  we  find  in  particular 
some  notes  of  the  teaching  of  Zeno  of  Sidon  (flor.  c. 
80  B.C.)  on  this  very  matter.  Zeno  admits  that  a  few 
unusual  instances  of  a  sequence  are  insufficient  to 
establish  a  general  rule,  while  a  complete  examina- 
tion of  all  relevant  cases  is  usually  impossible.  So 
he  holds  that  in  order  to  make  a  safe  generalisation 
we  require  to  examine  a  number  of  instances  which, 
though  alike  in  some  one  respect,  vary  among  them- 
selves in  other  respects.  By  comparison  we  may  then 
discover  what  has  been  the  one  regular  concomitant  in 
all  these  cases  of  the  result  we  are  interested  in,  and 
then  reason  by  analogy  to  the  presence  of  this  con- 
comitant in  other  cases.  This  is,  of  course,  the  same 
55 


EPICURUS 

method  afterwards  called  by  J.  S.  Mill  the  Method 
of  Agreement,  and,  like  that  method,  is  too  vague  to 
be  of  any  great  value  except  as  a  basis  for  mere 
suggestions  of  possible  connections  in  Nature.  As 
Wallace  says,  Zeno  (and  we  may  say  the  same  of  Mill) 
evades  the  difficulty  of  saying  how  much  resemblance 
warrants  us  in  regarding  a  number  of  facts  as  forming 
one  '  kind '  or  '  class  '  of  cases.  We  may  add,  I  think, 
a  further  criticism  against  the  whole  conception  of 
'analogy'  from  the  perceptible  as  the  only  method  of 
discovering  the  'latent  processes'  in  Nature.  Why 
need  the  behaviour  of  ultimate  molecular  or  atomic 
bodies  (if  there  are  such  things)  be  analogous  at  all 
with  the  facts  of  sense-perception  ?  In  fact  most 
theories  of  Physics  ascribe  to  the  simple  ultimate 
elements  motions  which  seem  strikingly  unlike  those 
which  fall  under  direct  sense-perception.  E.g.  Newton's 
first  law  of  Motion  or  the  law  of  the  Conservation  of 
Energy  seems  at  first  sight  to  be  contradicted  by  sense- 
perception.  We  accept  them,  not  because  the  pro- 
cesses they  assume  are  like  what  we  actually  see,  but 
because  we  can  deduce  the  results  we  see  from  them. 

3.  Physics — The  Structure  of  the  Universe. 

From  Plutarch  (adv.  Coloiem,  3)  we  learn  that 
Epicurus  had  at  one  time,  like  his  teacher  Nausiphanes, 
been  content  to  call  himself  a  Democritean,  and  when 
we  examine  his  physical  theory  we  shall  find  that  it  is, 
in  fact,  merely  that  of  Democritus  altered  for  the 
worse  and  cut  away  from  the  anti-sensational  theory 
56 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

of  knowledge  with  which  Democritus  had  rightly 
connected  it.  As  Cicero  says  (De  Finibus,  i.  17),  'In 
his  Physics,  of  which  he  makes  a  special  boast,  Epicurus 
is  absolutely  dependent  on  others.  He  repeats  the 
views  of  Democritus  with  a  few  minor  changes,  and, 
in  my  judgment,  his  pretended  improvements  are 
really  changes  for  the  worse.'  Epicurus  then,  like  the 
fifth-century  philosophers  to  whom  he  goes  back  for 
his  view  of  the  world,  is  in  principle  a  pure  materialist. 
His  two  fundamental  doctrines,  like  those  of  Leucippus 
and  Democritus,  are  (1)  nothing  is  created  out  of 
nothing  or  annihilated  into  nothing,  (2)  nothing  exists 
except  bodies  and  empty  space.  '  The  whole  universe 
is  bodies  and  space,  for  sensation  itself  universally 
testifies  that  there  are  bodies,  and  reason  must  infer  to 
the  imperceptible  on  the  analogy  of  sensation.  And 
if  there  were  not  place,  or  void,  or  room,  or  the 
intangible  as  we  may  also  call  it,  bodies  would  have 
nowhere  to  exist  nor  wherein  to  move '  (Ep.  i., 
Usener,  p.  5). 

From  this  he  infers  that  the  ultimate  bodies  are 
atomic,  or  indivisible  (i.e.  physically  indiscerptible, 
not  geometrically  unextended),  by  the  argument,  that 
if  bodies  were  infinitely  divisible,  all  bodies  could  be 
ultimately  broken  up  into  infinitely  small  parts  and 
thus  annihilated.  'We  may  not  believe  that  a  finite 
body  contains  an  infinite  or  an  indefinitely  great  num- 
ber of  particles;  so  we  must  deny  the  possibility  of 
infinite  subdivision  .  .  .  lest  we  should  be  forced  to 
57 


EPICURUS 

admit  that  what  is  can  be  annihilated  by  the  constant 
pressure  of  surrounding  bodies '  (Ep.  i.,  Usener,  p.  5). 
Atoms,  again,  must  be  incapable  of  change,  since,  if 
there  is  to  be  no  annihilation  of  what  is,  there  must 
be  a  permanent  substratum  which  persists  under  all 
change.  Hence,  while  we  may  attribute  to  atoms,  as 
to  sensible  bodies,  bulk  and  shape  and  weight,  we  must 
not  ascribe  to  them  any  further  sensible  qualities. 

Here  we  are  led  into  a  difficulty  due  to  the  incon- 
sistency between  Atomism  and  the  sensationalistic 
theory  of  knowledge.  Democritus  had  drawn  from 
the  variability  of  the  colours,  tastes,  etc.,  of  the  bodies 
we  perceive  the  conclusion  of  Locke  and  Descartes, 
that  such  sense-qualities  are  mere  subjective  effects  of 
the  mechanical  properties  of  bodies  on  our  organism. 
Hence  he  had  held  that  judgments  about  the  sensible 
qualities  of  bodies  have  no  objective  validity ;  they 
belong  to  the  'bastard  '  form  of  conviction.  '  Things 
are  only  sweet  or  bitter,  etc.,  by  convention ;  in  reality 
there  are  only  atoms  and  the  void.'  Epicurus  could 
not  follow  him  here,  since  to  do  so  would  be  fatal  to 
the  fundamental  doctrine  of  his  Canonic,  that  sensation 
always  represents  its  immediate  external  object  just  as 
it  is,  without  addition,  subtraction  or  modification. 
He  seems  to  have  tried  to  reconcile  the  two  views  in 
this  way.  In  every  composite  body  there  are  atoms 
of  very,  different  sizes  and  shapes,  and  consequently 
these  varieties  are  reproduced  in  the  '  skins '  (etSwAa) 
thrown  from  bodies,  which  are  the  immediate  stimuli 
58 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

and  objects  of  sensation.  But  owing  to  the  differences 
in  the  constitution  of  organisms,  only  some  of  these  may 
be  able  to  act  on  a  given  sense-organ.  Hence  a  thing 
may  appear  to  different  persons  to  be  of  different 
colours,  red  to  you,  gray  to  me  (if  I  am  colour-blind). 
The  '  image '  or  '  skin '  itself  contains  both  atoms 
suited  to  evoke  the  sensation  c  red '  and  other  fitted  to 
evoke  '  gray ' ;  but  the  one  set  make  their  way  into 
your  sense-organs  the  other  into  mine.  The  thing 
actually  is  at  once  red  (and  thus  your  sensation  is 
'  true/)  and  gray,  (and  so  mine  is  true  also).  Colour, 
therefore,  is  not  a  subjective  illusion,  but  a  '  variable 
quality  '  (o-v/xTrrw/xa,  the  word  seems  to  be  medical,  and 
to  mean  a  '  fit,'  or  sudden  seizure,)  of  the  external  body, 
as  distinguished  from  its  o-D/x/Se/ifyKOTa,  viz. :  the 
permanent  predicates,  which  do  not  thus  vary,  but,  as 
their  name  implies,  always  '  go  with '  the  thing,  its 
primary  qualities.  Cf.  Ep.  i.  (Usener,  p.  11):  'We 
must  hold  that  we  see  and  recognise  the  shapes  of 
things  in  virtue  of  the  entrance  of  something  from 
actual  bodies.  For  bodies  outside  us  could  not  have 
set  the  stamp  of  their  colour  and  shape  upon  us  by 
means  of  the  air  between  us  and  them,  or  of  effluences 
of  any  kind  proceeding  from  ourselves  to  them  [this 
is  directed  against  Aristotle  and  Plato],  so  well  as  on 
the  hypothesis  that  certain  imprints  enter  into  us 
from  external,  things,  preserving  their  colour  and 
shape,  and  making  their  way  in  accord  with  the 
appropriate  magnitude  into  the  eye  or  the  mind ' ;  and 

59 


EPICURUS 

ib.  (Usener,  p.  22) :  '  Further,  the  shapes,  colours, 
magnitudes,  and  all  that  is  predicated  of  bodies  as  an 
attribute  of  all  bodies,  or  of  all  visible  bodies,  and  as 
knowable  by  bodily  perception,  must  neither  be  held  to 
be  realities  per  se  (which  is  inconceivable),  nor  to  be 
simply  non-existent,  nor  to  be  incorporeal  predicates  of 
body,  nor  parts  of  it  .  .  .'  Immediately  on  this  follows 
the  definition  of  the  a-vfj.TTTWfj.aTa,  or  variable  accidents 
as  distinct  from  the  permanent  properties  of  bodies. 

Of  course  we  may  retort  that  this  is  no  solution  of 
the  difficulty.  A  mechanical  configuration  which 
awakens  the  perception  of  red  is  not  the  same  as  a  red 
thing,  and  moreover,  on  Epicurus'  own  showing,  if  a 
thing  is  both  red  and  gray,  and  I  only  perceive  it  as 
red,  I  am  not  apprehending  it  '  without  subtraction.' l 

I  do  not  know  how  to  account  for  the  inconsequence 
of  Epicurus  in  thus  making  the  doctrine  of  Democritus 
absurd  by  combining  it  with  sensationalism,  except 
perhaps  on  the  ground  that  his  theory  aims  at  incor- 
porating the  view  of  Nature  which  had  been  just  made 
popular  by  Aristotle.  According  to  Aristotle,  who 
reverted  in  this  respect  to  the  standpoint  of  pre- 
Democritean  natural  science,  the  fundamental  distinc- 
tions in  Nature  are  not  geometrical  or  mechanical,  but 
qualitative,  the  distinctions  between  hot,  cold;  dry, 
moist ;  white,  black,  and  the  other  contrary  opposites 
of  sense-perception.  The  attempt  to  fuse  this  point 

1  The  indications  afforded  by  Lucretius,  ii.  795-816,  point  to 
the  interpretation  I  have  given  in  the  text. 

60 


THE   NATURE    OF   REALITY 

of  view  with  the  rigidly  mechanical  theory  of  Atomism 
was  bound  to  produce  strange  results,  and  we  shall 
see  that  it  is  probably  responsible  for  another  grave 
departure  from  Democritus. 

Epicurus  next  infers,  like  Democritus,  that  the 
number  of  atoms  is  infinite.  The  All  must  be  infinite, 
because  whatever  is  finite  has  limits,  and  so  has  some- 
thing outside  itself,  but  there  can  be  nothing  outside 
the  All.  The  argument,  like  most  of  those  we  have 
hitherto  seen  produced  by  him,  is  an  old  one,  as  it  goes 
back  to  the  famous  Eleatic,  Melissus  of  Samos.  It 
seems  to  be,  when  applied  to  prove  the  conclusion 
Epicurus  draws  from  it,  a  sophism,  since  it  does  not 
follow  that  because  the  All  has  nothing  outside  it, 
the  number  of  things  it  contains  must  be  infinite. 
(Melissus,  in  fact,  used  the  argument  to  prove  that 
the  All  must  be  one  just  because  it  is  infinite.)  But 
Epicurus  adds  a  further  physical  reason.  'The  All 
must  be  infinite  both  in  respect  of  the  number  of 
bodies,  i.e.  atoms),  and  in  respect  of  the  extent  of  void. 
For  if  the  void  were  infinite,  but  the  number  of  bodies 
finite,  the  bodies  would  never  have  remained  anywhere, 
but  would  have  been  scattered  and  dissipated  through 
the  void,  having  nothing  to  support  them  and  fix  them 
in  position  when  they  rebound  from  collision,  and  if 
the  void  were  finite  it  would  not  contain  the  infinity 
of  bodies '  (Ep.  i.,  Usener,  p.  7).  I  do  not  see  that  the 
argument,  which  has  all  the  appearance  of  coming 
from  the  fifth  century  Atomists,  is  conclusive.  It  is 
61 


EPICURUS 

true  that  you  cannot  find  room  for  an  infinity  of  atoms 
in  a  limited  space,  but  the  proof  that  the  number  of 
atoms  must  be  infinite  if  space  is  unlimited  seems  un- 
satisfactory. Even  on  the  supposition  of  an  infinite 
space  with  a  finite  number  of  atoms  in  it,  why  might 
not  the  attractive  forces,  however  you  conceive  them, 
hold  the  atoms  together  indefinitely  ?  Or  even  if  you 
grant  the  consequence  proved,  why  should  it  be  absurd 
to  hold  that  it  really  will  be  the  fate  of  the  universe  to  be 
disintegrated  into  individual  atoms  each  at  an  infinite 
distance  from  every  other  1  To  make  it  absurd,  you 
would  need  to  prove  that  the  world  has  already  ex- 
isted for  an  infinite  time,  so  that  the  disruption,  if  it 
were  possible,  ought  to  have  occurred  already.  But 
Epicurus  merely  assumes  the  eternity  of  the  world 
without  proof. 

When  we  come  to  the  theory  of  the  motion  of  the 
atom  we  get  at  once  a  fundamental  divergence  from 
Democritus  which,  as  the  Academic  critics  observed, 
shows  the  inferiority  of  Epicurus  as  a  scientific  thinker. 
To  judge  from  the  criticism  of  Aristotle,  who  com- 
plains that  Democritus  had  never  explained  what  is 
the  natural  movement  of  atoms  (i.e.  how  an  atom  would 
move  if  it  were  not  deflected  by  collision  with  other 
atoms),  we  should  suppose  that  Democritus  started 
with  an  infinite  number  of  atoms  moving  in  every 
direction,  and  we  know  for  certain  that  he  held  that 
atoms  move  with  different  velocities,  the  bulkier  more 
rapidly  than  the  less  bulky  In  this  way,  when  they 
62 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

come  to  collide  the  less  bulky  atoms  are  squeezed  out- 
wards, and  form  a  kind  of  film  round  a  denser  centre. 
Whether  Democritus  believed  in  absolute  direction 
in  space  we  are  not  told,  but  we  have,  I  think,  the 
right  to  infer  from  the  data  before  us  that  he  made  no 
use  of  the  antithesis  of  up  and  down  in  his  theory,  and 
did  not  regard  his  atoms  as  '  falling.'  In  other  words, 
the  ancient  tradition,  for  which  we  have  the  express 
testimony  of  Theophrastus,  is  absolutely  correct  in 
asserting  that  Democritus  did  not  regard  weight  as 
an  inherent  property  of  the  atom.  According  to  him 
the  inherent  properties  of  the  atom  are  two,  shape  and 
bulk.  Weight  was  added  as  a  third  by  Epicurus.  In 
this  Democritus  was,  of  course,  right,  since  the  weight 
of  a  body  is  purely  relative  to  its  surroundings,  while 
its  mass  (which  is  invariable)  would,  in  the  case  of  an 
atom,  be  strictly  proportional  to  its  bulk. 

Now  Epicurus  makes  both  the  assumption  (1)  that 
all  atoms  have  weight,  but  irrespective  of  their  weight, 
move  with  the  same  velocity  through  the  void,  because 
it  offers  no  resistance  to  them ;  (2)  and  that  they  all 
move,  until  deflected  by  collision  in  one  and  the  same 
direction,  viz.  down,  the  reason  why  they  move  down- 
wards, rather  than  in  any  other  direction,  being  their 
weight.  Thus  we  have  to  think  of  all  atoms  as 
primarily  falling  in  parallel  straight  lines,  with  equal 
velocities,  towards  a  fixed  plane  at  an  infinite  distance, 
in  the  direction  from  our  heads  to  our  feet.  Apparently 
the  assumption  of  the  uniform  direction  rests  on  a  bad 

63 


EPICURUS 

generalisation  from  our  experience  of  the  falling  of 
bodies  to  the  earth.  The  blunder  made  in  this  as- 
sumption is  not,  as  is  often  said,  that  Epicurus  believes 
in  an  absolute  and  not  merely  a  relative  difference  of 
directions  in  space,  but  that  he  treats  gravity  as  an 
inherent  tendency  in  material  particles  to  move  to- 
wards a  fixed  plane  in  empty  space,  whereas  it  is  really 
a  tendency  to  move  in  the  direction  of  other  material 
particles.  What  he  does  not  see  is  that  a  single  par- 
ticle, alone  in  infinite  space,  would  not  gravitate  at  all, 
and  that  the  direction  of  gravity  at  different  places  is 
not  the  same.  As  to  the  point  about  equal  velocity, 
Democritus  was  clearly  thinking  in  the  right  scientific 
spirit  when  he  began  with  the  assumption  of  atoms 
moving  with  every  degree  of  velocity,  since  no  valid 
reason  can  be  given  for  supposing  uniformity.  Epicurus' 
apparent  ground  for  asserting  the  uniformity,  viz., 
that  there  can  be  no  friction  between  empty  space  and 
the  atoms,  is  obviously  worthless,  since  it  proves  no 
more  than  that  the  velocity  of  an  atom  falling  through 
empty  space  would,  in  the  absence  of  all  other  bodies, 
be  constant ;  not  that  for  two  atoms,  let  us  say  at  an 
immense  distance  from  each  other,  it  must  be  the  same. 
But  it  is  noticeable  that  he  has  accidentally  stumbled 
on  a  truth  about  gravity  which  is  not  suggested  by  our 
sensible  experience.  It  is  true  that  in  a  perfect  vacuum 
particles  would  fall  towards  the  centre  of  a  large  at- 
tracting mass  from  equal  distances  in  equal  time.  But 
this  does  not  show  that  all  atoms  originally  move  with 
64 


THE   NATURE   OF  REALITY 

equal  velocity ;  it  only  shows  that  that  part  of  the  velo- 
city of  two  bodies  which  is  due  to  gravitation  towards 
the  same  fixed  third  body  would  be  equal  in  empty 
space.  Of  course,  neither  Democritus  nor  Epicurus 
could  have  worked  out  a  really  satisfactory  cosmical 
mechanics,  as  neither  possessed  the  conceptions  of  mass 
and  momentum. 

We  may  perhaps  conjecture  the  reason  for  Epicurus' 
unscientific  depravation  of  the  atomic  doctrine  as  to  the 
movement  of  the  atom.  The  doctrine  that  'up 'and 
'down'  correspond  to  the  distinction  between  move- 
ment from  the  centre  of  the  universe  towards  its 
circumference,  and  that  from  its  circumference  to  its 
centre  is  a  prominent  feature  in  the  philosophy  of 
Aristotle,  who  combines  it  with  the  view  that  '  heavy 
bodies'  naturally  move  'down,'  towards  the  centre,  'light 
bodies'  'up,'  perpendicularly  away  from  the  centre. 
As  Professor  Burnet  says,  this  doctrine  led  to  no  serious 
difficulties  in  the  Aristotelian  Physics,  because  Aristotle 
thought  that  there  is  only  one  world,  and  does  not 
attribute  weight  to  the  '  heavens '  which  bound  it. 
The  real  confusions  only  come  out  when  the  theory  of 
the  tendency  of  heavy  bodies  to  fall  '  down '  towards 
a  fixed  centre  is  combined  with  the  belief  in  an  infinite 
void.  This  unhappy  combination  of  incompatibles 
looks,  as  Burnet  says,  as  though  it  were  definitely  in- 
tended to  meet  Aristotle's  unwise  criticism  of  Demo- 
critus and  Leucippus  by  ascribing  one  and  the  same 
'natural'  movement  to  all  atoms.  In  that  case  we 
E  65 


EPICURUS 

must  ascribe  the  doctrine  to  Epicurus,  not  to  any  prede- 
cessor, and  it  will  be  clear  that  the  only  original  feature 
of  his  system  is  just  the  most  illogical  thing  in  it.1 

We  come  now  to  the  crowning  absurdity  of  the 
whole  scheme.  If  the  atoms  all  fall  perpendicularly, 
from  all  eternity,  in  the  same  direction  and  with 
uniform  velocity,  obviously  no  atom  should  overtake 
another,  and  no  compound  bodies  should  ever  be 
formed.  Instead  of  a  world  or  worlds  of  such  bodies 
there  ought  to  be  at  every  moment  a  downward  rain 
of  atoms  preserving  their  original  distances  from  each 
other,  and  the  condition  of  the  universe  at  any  moment 
ought  to  be  indistinguishable  from  its  condition  at  any 
other.  This  is  obviously  not  the  case,  though  it  is 
exactly  what  would  happen  if  the  whole  motion  of  each 
particle  were  due  solely,  as  we  should  say,  to  gravita- 
tion. To  reconcile  his  first  hypothesis  about  the  motion 
of  the  atom  with  sensible  fact,  Epicurus  has  to  make  a 
second  assumption  which  virtually  ruins  his  funda- 
mental theory  that  the  course  of  Nature  is  mechanical. 
He  assumed  that  at  certain  moments  which  we  cannot 
predict,  and  for  no  assignable  cause,  the  atom  may 
swerve  to  a  very  slight  degree  out  of  the  path  of  per- 
pendicular descent.  These  incalculable  swervings, 
often  enough  repeated,  may  lead  to  a  notable  defiec- 

1  See  Burnet,  Early  Greek  Philosophy,  396-397.  I  have  tried 
to  show  that  his  theory  of  Epicureanism  as  a  conflation  of 
Democritus  with  Aristotle  is  confirmed  by  other  inconsistencies 
in  Epicurus  which  are  most  naturally  explained  in  the  same 
way. 

66 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

tion  of  the  atom's  path.    In  this  way  atoms  may  come  to 
collide  and  adhere,  and  so,  in  process  of  time,  to  form 
a  world  of  perceptible  compound  bodies.     This  is  the 
doctrine  of  the  declination  (irapeyK Ato-is,  dinamen)  of  the 
atom  expounded  by  Lucretius  in  Book  ii.  217  ff.     No 
confirmation  of  the  theory  is  offered  except  that  given 
by  Lucretius,  the  existence  of  unmotived  free-will  in 
animals.     On  the  theory  that  the  soul,  like  everything 
except  the  void,  is  made  of  atoms,  Lucretius  argues,  you 
cannot  account  for  volition,  or  escape  fatalism,  except 
by  endowing  the  atoms  with  the  capacity  for  capricious 
deviation  from  their  regular  paths.     Now  the  Epicu- 
reans were  determined  to  uphold  free-will  in  the  sense 
of  absolutely  unmotived  volition  against  the  Stoic  de- 
terminism.    Epicurus  himself  had  said  (Ep.  iii.,  Use- 
ner,  p.  15),  '  It  would  be  better  to  believe  the  tale  about 
the  gods  than  to  be  enslaved  to  the  Destiny  of  the 
physicists ;  the  former  leaves  a  prospect  of  changing  the 
purposes  of  the  gods  by  propitiating  them,  the  latter 
sets  up  a  necessity  which  cannot  be  propitiated.'  Thus 
the  source  of  the  doctrine  was  simply  a  desire  to  avoid 
a  practically   uncomfortable   conclusion.     Instead   of 
trying  to  show  that  rigid  determinism  is  false,  Epicurus 
merely  declines  to  believe  in  it,  though  it  is  a  logical  con- 
sequence of  the  mechanical  view  of  things,  because  he 
dislikes  the  influence  of  the  belief  on  human  happiness. 
He  then  uses  this  appeal  to  prejudice,  to  bolster  up  his 
absurd  natural  science.    (That  the  free-will  of  Epicurus 
really  means  pure  caprice,  not,  as  has  been  sometimes 


EPICURUS 

fancied,  rational  self-determination,  is  shown  e.g.  by 
Lucretius  ii.  299,  where  the  poet  adds  to  his  previous 
mistaken  assertion  that  weight  is  an  internal  cause  of 
movement  the  remark  that  the  'declination'  of  the 
atom  at  uncertain  times  and  places  shows  that  there  is 
no  internal  necessity  in  the  behaviour  of  the  mind. 
Carneades,  the  great  sceptic,  correctly  remarked  (Cicero, 
de  Fato,  23)  that  Epicurus  might  have  defended  freedom 
without  the  extravagant  fiction  of  Trapey/cAicm,  if  he 
had  simply  said  that  the  cause  of  a  voluntary  action  is 
not  external  to  the  mind.  This,  however,  would  have 
been  fatal  to  his  materialistic  theory  of  the  mind  as  a 
complex  of  atoms.) 

The  unscientific  character  of  this  method  of  saving 
one  improvable  hypothesis  by  a  second  which  really 
contradicts  the  first  formed  one  of  the  standing  grounds 
for  censure  of  Epicurus  in  antiquity.  Cicero  sums  up 
the  Academic  criticism  when  he  says,  '  He  holds  that 
solid  atoms  fall  downward  by  their  own  weight  in 
straight  lines,  and  that  this  is  the  natural  movement 
of  all  bodies.  Then  it  occurred  to  this  truly  acute 
thinker  that  if  all  things  fall  downwards  in  straight 
lines,  no  atom  would  ever  overtake  another,  and  so  he 
availed  himself  of  a  pure  fiction.  He  said  that  the 
atom  swerves  slightly  from  its  path  (a  most  ridiculous 
suggestion),  and  that  this  leads  to  combinations,  aggre- 
gations, and  adhesions  of  atoms,  which,  in  their  turn, 
lead  to  the  formation  of  a  world '  (De  Natura  Deorum, 
i.  69). 

68 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

The  infinite  worlds. — The  Epicurean  definition  of  a 
'world,'  or  orderly  system  of  atoms,  is  'a  region  of  the 
heavens,  containing  stars,  an  earth,  and  all  perceptible 
bodies,  cut  off  from  the  void  and  terminated  by  a 
boundary  which  may  be  in  rotation  or  at  rest,  and 
may  have  a  round,  a  triangular,  or  any  other  figure. 
For  all  figures  are  possible,  since  no  evidence  can  be 
found  to  the  contrary  in  our  own  world,  since  its 
boundary  is  not  perceptible  '  ([Ep.]  ii.,  Usener,  p.  37). 
In  this  definition  the  words  'cut  off — void '  are  known 
to  be  a  quotation  from  Leucippus,  and  what  precedes 
them  probably  comes  from  the  same  source ;  the  addi- 
tion that  such  a  '  world '  may  or  may  not  be  moving 
as  a  whole,  and  may  have  any  shape,  is  partly  at  least 
original,  since  it  alludes  to  the  peculiar  Epicurean 
theory  of  knowledge.  Epicurus  also  borrows  from 
Leucippus  and  Democritus  the  doctrine  that  the 
universe  contains  an  infinite  number  of  such  worlds. 
'We  see  that  the  number  of  such  worlds  is  infinite,  and 
that  such  a  world  may  arise  cither  within  another 
world,  or  in  the  intermundial  spaces,  by  which  we  mean 
the  intervals  of  empty  space  between  different  worlds.' 
As  we  have  scon,  Epicurus  maintained  that  any  number 
of  divergent  explanations  of  the  formation  of  the 
things  composing  a  world  might  be  equally  good,  pro- 
vided that  they  only  exclude  all  divine  agency  and 
conform  to  the  general  principles  of  atomism.  Of  the 
movements  of  the  heavenly  bodies  it  is  expressly  said, 
'  To  assign  one  single  explanation  of  these  facts  when 
69 


EPICURUS 

the  phenomena  suggest  several  is  the  action  of  a 
lunatic,  and  a  very  improper  proceeding  of  those  who 
emulate  the  follies  of  the  astronomers'  (i.e.  the  scientific 
astronomers  of  the  Platonic  school).  He  even  scan- 
dalised the  scientific  by  the  ridiculous  assertion  that 
the  heavenly  bodies  are  approximately  of  their  apparent 
size.  '  Relatively  to  us  the  size  of  the  sun  and  moon 
and  the  other  heavenly  bodies  is  just  what  it  appears 
to  be ;  absolutely  it  is  either  a  little  larger  or  a  little 
smaller,  or  as  the  case  may  be.'  His  argument  is  that 
a  bonfire  seen  from  a  distance  appears  about  as  big  as 
it  really  is,  and  we  may  conclude  to  the  case  of  the 
sun  and  moon  by  analogy.  So  generally  we  find  the 
'  second  letter '  full  of  alternative  explanations  of  facts 
in  which  the  results  of  the  latest  science  and  the  crudest 
guesses  of  the  earliest  Milesians  are  treated  as  much  on 
a  par. 

I  do  not  propose  to  enter  here  into  the  details  of 
these  ludicrous  theories,  but  there  is  one  point  on 
which  a  word  should  be  said.  The  Epicureans  have 
sometimes  been  unduly  belauded  as  pioneers  of  the 
doctrine  of  'evolution.'  In  point  of  fact,  the  general 
conception  of  the  origin  of  species  by  gradual  develop- 
ment is  as  old  as  Anaximander  of  Miletus  in  the  early 
part  of  the  sixth  century,  and  had  been  specially 
expounded  by  Empedocles  in  the  fifth.  Hence,  as 
there  is,  so  far  as  I  know,  no  evidence  that  Epicurus 
concerned  himself  much  with  the  subject,  I  think  it 
most  probable  that  the  remarkable  anticipations  of 
70 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

Lamarck  which  we  find  in  the  fifth  book  of  Lucretius 
come  from  Empedocles,  whom  he  regarded  as  his 
literary  model,  rather  than  from  Epicurus.  The  real 
way  to  put  the  matter  is  that  Epicurus,  like  the 
evolutionists,  rejects  all  teleological  explanation  of 
natural  facts.  Eyes  and  ears  have  not  been  'given 
to  us,'  as  Plato  had  asserted,  in  order  to  lead  us  to 
philosophic  reflection  and  scientific  knowledge.  We 
do  not  have  eyes  and  ears  that  we  may  see  and  hear ; 
AVC  see  and  hear  merely  because  we  happen  to  have 
eyes  and  ears.  Function  does  not  create  organisation, 
as  modern  biologists  ure  teaching  us;  organs  create 
function. 

Psychology. — The  soul  is,  of  course,  material  and 
made  of  atoms.  The  only  immaterial  existent  is 
empty  space,  but  empty  space  cannot  act  or  be  acted 
on  as  the  soul  can.  '  Hence  those  who  call  the  soul 
immaterial  talk  nonsense.  If  it  were  so,  it  could 
neither  act  nor  be  acted  upon.  But  in  fact  it  is  clear 
and  evident  that  both  these  states  belong  to  the  soul ' 
(Ep.  i.,  Usener,  p.  21).  More  particularly,  it  is  made 
of  the  finest  and  roundest  particles,  and  this  accounts 
for  its  quickness  of  sensibility  and  volition,  such 
particles  being  more  mobile  than  any  others.  (This 
is  merely  Democritus  repeated.)  'We  can  see  by 
appealing  to  sensation  and  feeling,  the  surest  of 
criteria,  that  the  soul  is  a  subtle  body  scattered 
through  our  whole  frame,  similar  to  breath,  with  an 
admixture  of  warmth,  and  that  in  some  parts  it  is 
71 


EPICURUS 

more  like  the  one,  in  some  like  the  other,  but  in  one 
special  part  [I  read  ITT!  Se  TOV  /xepovs  for  Usener's  e:ri 
Se  TOV  p..,  which  may  be  an  oversight,]  it  far  surpasses 
even  breath  and  heat  themselves  in  fineness,  and  is 
consequently  all  the  quicker  to  be  affected  by  the 
condition  of  the  rest  of  our  frame '  (Ep.  i.,  Usener, 
pp.  19-20).  According  to  the  still  more  precise  account 
followed  by  Lucretius  (iii.  227  ff.)  and  the  Placita  of 
Aetius  (iv.  3,  11),  the  soul  is  'a  mixture  of  four  things, 
one  of  a  fiery  nature,  another  of  the  nature  of  air, 
a  third  of  the  nature  of  breath,  and  a  fourth  which 
has  no  name.  It  is  this  last  which  is  the  sensitive 
principle;  the  "breath"  is  the  source  of  motion,  the 
"air"  of  rest,  the  hot  element  of  the  sensible  heat  of 
the  body,  while  the  nameless  principle  produces  sensa- 
tion in  us,  for  there  is  no  sensibility  in  any  of  the 
elements  which  have  got  names.' 

It  is  this  fourth  'nameless'  part  which  Lucretius 
regularly  calls  the  anima  (mind),  as  distinct  from  the 
animus  or  soul  as  a  whole.  Thus  to  the  other  three 
constituents  Epicurus  assigns  the  functions  of  respira- 
tion, motion,  and  the  like.  They  constitute  the  vital 
principle ;  the  unnamed  fourth  part  is  the  principle  of 
sensation,  and,  since  all  mental  activity  is  based  on 
sensation,  of  consciousness  generally.  We  have  to 
think  of  the  soul  as  not  localised  in  any  one  part 
of  the  body  but  diffused  through  it,  particles  of  the 
soul-stuff  being  everywhere  mixed  up  with  the  grosser 
particles  Avhich  form  the  'flesh,'  as  Epicurus  prefers 
72 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

to  call  the  body.  But  consciousness  is  more  definitely 
located  in  a  special  region,  that  of  the  heart,  since  the 
atoms  of  the  'nameless  part'  are  held  to  be  con- 
gregated there.  The  difference  between  the  soul  and 
the  body  thus  becomes  one  of  degree.  The  soul  is  no 
longer,  as  with  Plato,  different  in  kind  from  and  in- 
commensurable with  the  body,  nor,  as  with  Aristotle, 
the  true  reality  of  which  the  body  is  the  mere  indis- 
pensable condition.  As  with  Democritus,  the  soul  is 
itself  a  body  composed  of  smaller  and  more  mobile 
atoms  than  the  gross  visible  body.  Sensation  and  all 
the  other  mental  processes  are  thought  of  as  actual 
movements  belonging  partly  to  the  '  flesh,'  partly  to 
the  soul.  The  bodies  of  the  outer  world  are  always 
shedding  off  skins  or  coats  of  surface-atoms,  which  for 
a  while  cohere  and  retain  the  shape  of  the  body  from 
which  they  are  emitted.  And,  in  course  of  time,  some 
of  these  atoms  may  be  dissociated  from  their  original 
setting  and  joined  with  others  to  form  a  new  skin  or 
image.  When  a  '  husk '  of  either  of  these  kinds  comes 
in  contact  with  a  sense-organ,  it  may  literally  force  a 
passage  through  into  the  organism.  If  it  can  hang 
together  until  it  reaches  the  'nameless'  part  of  the 
soul  and  impinges  on  it,  there  arises  a  conscious 
sensation.  This  theory  of  sensation  as  due  to  the 
actual  entrance  of  atomic  '  skins '  into  the  body  comes 
from  Democritus,  except  that,  whereas  Democritus  had 
supposed  the  '  skins '  to  be  formed  out  of  the  air  or 
water  which  surrounds  bodies,  and  to  be  propagated 

73 


EPICURUS 

through  air  or  water  to  the  percipient,  Epicurus  holds 
that  they  are  formed  of  atoms  actually  detached  from 
the  perceived  body  itself,  and  propagated  through 
empty  space  with  an  infinite  velocity.  The  whole 
theory,  of  course,  ignores  the  fundamental  fact  of 
which  a  doctrine  of  perception  has  to  take  account,  the 
personal  individuality  of  the  perceiving  self. 

Since  the  soul  is  formed  of  the  smallest  and  most 
mobile  atoms,  it  would  naturally  be  more  quickly 
dissipated  into  its  constituents  than  anything  else  in 
Nature,  if  it  were  not  that  it  is  shielded  during  life  by 
the  integument  of  grosser  atoms  which  surrounds  it. 
Thus  it  is  not  the  soul  which  holds  the  body  together, 
but  the  body  which  holds  the  soul  together.  Hence, 
at  death,  when  the  soul  is  eliminated  from  its  covering, 
the  body,  it  is  instantly  disintegrated,  and  conscious- 
ness and  personality  are  finally  annihilated.  'When 
the  whole  complex  is  dissolved,  the  soul  is  dispersed 
and  no  longer  has  the  same  powers,  no  longer  is  moved 
nor  has  perception.  For  that  which  perceives  can  no 
longer  perceive  anything,  since  it  no  longer  belongs  to 
this  complex  nor  has  these  motions,  since  the  things 
which  envelope  and  surround  it  are  not  such  as  those 
in  which  it  now  exists  and  possesses  these  motions ' 
(Ep.  i.,  Usener,  p.  21),  The  ethical  inference  is  then 
drawn  that  it  is  folly  to  fear  death,  since  there  is  no 
consciousness  after  death.  'Death  is  nothing  to  us, 
for  when  we  are,  death  is  not ;  and  when  death  is,  we 
are  not.' 

74 


THE   NATURE   OF    REALITY 

'Accustom  thyself  to  reflect  that  death  is  nothing 
to  us,  since  good  and  bad  depend  entirely  on  sensation, 
and  death  is  privation  of  sensation.  Hence  the  true 
knowledge  that  death  is  nothing  to  us  makes  mortal 
life  enjoyable,  not  by  adding  endless  duration  to  it, 
but  by  taking  away  the  craving  for  immortality. 
There  is  nothing  terrible  in  life  for  one  who  really 
comprehends  that  there  is  nothing  terrible  in  not 
living.  Hence  he  who  says  he  fears  death,  not  because 
it  will  be  painful  when  it  comes,  but  because  our  present 
assurance  that  it  will  come  is  painful,  is  a  fool.  It  is 
but  an  idle  pain  that  comes  of  anticipating  a  thing 
which  will  give  us  no  uneasiness  when  it  has  come. 
Death,  then,  that  most  dreaded  of  ills,  is  nothing  to 
us.  For  while  we  are,  death  is  not ;  and  when  death 
has  come,  we  are  not.  Death,  then,  is  nothing  to  the 
living  nor  yet  to  the  dead,  since  it  does  not  affect  the 
former,  and  the  latter  no  longer  exist.  The  crowd, 
to  be  sure,  at  one  time  shrink  from  death  as  the  worst 
of  evils,  at  another  choose  it  as  a  refuge  from  the 
miseries  of  life.  But  the  wise  man  neither  declines 
life  nor  shrinks  from  death,  since  life  is  not  distasteful 
to  him,  nor  does  he  think  it  an  evil  not  to  live ' 
(Ep.  iii.,  Usener,  p.  60).  Thus  Epicurus  uses  his 
borrowed  Psychology  to  achieve  the  extirpation  of 
the  fear  of  death  as  a  prime  disturber  of  human 
happiness.1 

1  The  famous  dilemma, '  Death  cannot  concern  us,  for  so  long 
as  we  are,  death  is  not,  and  when  death  is,  we  are  not,'  seems 

75 


EPICURUS 

Theology. — The  climax  of  the  Epicurean  Physics  is 
to  be  found  in  its  theory  of  the  gods,  which,  by  cutting 
them  adrift  altogether  from  human  life,  rids  us  of  all 
fear  of  their  anger  or  anxious  concern  to  win  their 
approval.  Epicurus  and  his  followers  were  often 
denounced  as  Atheists,  and  the  accusation  is  just  if 
it  means  that  they  denied  the  existence  of  gods  from 
whom  we  have  anything  to  hope  or  fear,  gods  who 
can  be  objects  of  our  love  or  can  help  humanity  in  its 
hour  of  need.  They  admit  the  existence  of  gods  in 
the  sense  of  superhuman  beings  who  lead  a  life  of 
unending  blessed  calm.  They  even  insist  on  their 
existence  and  anthropomorphic  character.  Epicurus 
himself  in  his  letter  to  Mcnoeceus  has  the  words, 
'  Follow  and  dwell  on  what  I  used  constantly  to 
declare  to  you,  and  believe  that  these  things  are  the 
foundation  of  a  worthy  life.  Believe,  in  the  first 
place,  of  God  that  he  is  an  imperishable  and  blessed 
living  being,  as  the  universally  diffused  idea  of  God 
testifies,  and  ascribe  to  him  nothing  inconsistent  with 
his  immortality  nor  unworthy  of  his  blessedness.  But 

to  be  no  more  original  than  the  rest  of  Epicurus'  philosophy. 
The  pseudo-Platonic  dialogue  Axioclius  (a  polemic  against 
Epicurus  by  a  contemporary  Platonist)  asserts  that  the  words 
were  a  saying  of  Prodicus  the  sophist,  and  the  statement  may 
very  possibly  be  true,  since  the  author's  aim  is  to  show  that 
Epicureanism,  which  he  describes  as  the  superficial  talk  of 
conceited  young  men,  is  merely  a  reproduction  of  the  dis- 
credited ideas  of  an  older  time.  Unless  the  saying  really  came 
from  Prodicus,  he  has  made  a  literary  blunder  in  putting  it 
into  his  mouth  in  auch  a  connection, 

76 


THE   NATURE   OF    REALITY 

believe  everything  which  can  consist  with  his  immor- 
tal blessedness.  For  gods  there  certainly  are,  since  our 
cognition  of  them  is  clear  and  evident.  But  gods  such  as 
the  vulgar  believe  in  there  are  not.  .  .  .  The  impious 
man  is  not  he  who  rejects  the  gods  of  the  vulgar,  but 
he  who  ascribes  to  the  gods  the  things  which  the 
vulgar  believe  of  them.' 

The  Epicurean  gods  are  thus  thought  of  as  magnified 
and  'non-natural'  Epicurean  philosophers,  enjoying, 
like  the  Epicurean  sage,  a  life  of  perfect  tranquillity, 
with  the  added  advantage  of  being  immortal.  They 
are  human  in  figure  and  there  are  many  of  them,  so 
that  they  can  pass  their  time  in  pleasant  social  inter- 
course. Epicurus  is  said  to  have  declared  that  in 
their  converse  they  speak  the  noblest  of  languages,  a 
pure  and  refined  Greek.  There  is  an  obvious  difficulty 
about  their  immortality  for  expositors  who  take 
Epicurus  seriously  as  a  thinker.  For  they  are  material, 
like  everything  except  space  itself,  and  Epicurus 
explicitly  declared  that  their  bodies  are  formed  of  the 
subtlest  matter.  How  then  do  they  escape  the  general 
law  that  all  atomic  complexes  are  destructible,  and  the 
finer  the  atoms,  the  less  permanent  the  complex?  It 
is  partly,  no  doubt,  to  meet  this  difficulty  that  Epicurus 
provided  them  with  abodes  in  the  intermundial  empty 
spaces,  where  they  would  be  least  subject  to  collision 
with  grosser  atoms.  At  least  Lucretius  gives  this 
reason  for  the  localisation. 

Now  Epicurus  held  that  tranquillity  is  only  possible 
77 


EPICURUS 

to  one  who  is  neither  anxious  for  others  nor  gives  others 
anxiety.  Hence  it  is  a  consequence  of  the  felicity  of 
the  gods  that  they  neither  influence  earthly  affairs  by 
their  providential  care,  nor  concern  themselves  with 
the  deeds  of  men.  This  is  laid  down  in  the  very  first 
words  of  the  Catechism  :  '  The  blessed  and  immortal 
has  no  anxieties  of  its  own,  and  causes  none  to  others. 
Thus  it  is  constrained  neither  by  favour  nor  by  anger.' 
Lucretius  is  constantly  recurring  to  the  same  point 
with  an  earnestness  which  shows  that  the  inherently 
anti-religious  doctrine  of  Epicurus  was,  in  his  case  at 
least,  accepted  in  part  from  a  real  religious  indignation 
against  the  immoral  features  of  popular  theology. 
Yet  one  wonders  whether  the  amiable  invalids  of  the 
garden  would  not  have  been  seriously  perturbed  in 
their  'feasts  on  the  20th'  by  the  apparition  of  a 
disciple  aflame  with  the  zeal  of  a  missionary.  I  cannot 
help  thinking  that  Epicurus  would  have  given  his 
worshipper  the  counsel  of  Voltaire,  Surtout  point  de  zele. 
The  moral  fervour  of  Lucretius  must  not  blind  us  to 
the  facts  that  he  stands  alone  among  the  Epicureans  of 
whom  we  know,  and  that  the  real  issue  at  stake  in  the 
Academic  polemic  against  Epicurus  is  the  momentous 
one  whether  or  not  religion  shall  continue  to  be  of 
practical  significance  for  life.  Yet  in  justice  to 
Epicurus  it  may  be  said  that,  after  all,  his  rejection  of 
Providence  and  prayer  leads  to  something  not  unlike 
the  Neo-Kantian  view  that  while  we  cannot  know 
whether  God  exists  or  not,  the  concept  of  God  is  none 

78 


THE   NATURE   OF   REALITY 

the  less  valuable  as  embodying  an  ethical  ideal  of 
perfection.  The  gods  of  Epicurus  are,  at  least,  an 
embodiment  of  the  ideal  '  wise  man,'  and  thus  the  con- 
templation of  them  may  be  of  actual  use  in  framing 
one's  own  mind  to  something  like  their  peace  and 
serenity.  This  is,  perhaps,  why  Epicurus  speaks  of 
the  thought  of  the  gods  as  bringing  the  greatest 
benefits  to  the  good. 


79 


CHAPTER    III 

THE   SALVATION   OF  MAN 

WE  come  now  to  the  central  citadel  of  Epicurean 
doctrine,  the  part  which,  as  Epicurus  holds,  gives  all 
the  rest  its  value — the  theory  of  human  conduct, 
variously  styled  by  him  the  doctrine  of  Lives,  of  Ends, 
of  Choice  and  Avoidance.  Here  again  we  shall  find  the 
attempt  to  replace  high  and  difficult  ideals  by  some 
more  homely  and  apparently  more  easily  compassed 
end  of  action.  Epicurus  wants  a  principle  of  conduct 
which  is  not  for  the  elect  few  only,  but  can  be 
immediately  understood  and  felt  by  the  common  man. 
Like  many  moralists  before  and  after  him,  he  thinks 
he  finds  what  he  wants  in  the  notion  of  pleasure  as 
the  only  good  and  pain  as  the  only  evil.  The  Platonic 
conception  of  life  as  'becoming  like  unto  God,'  the 
Aristotelian  identification  of  the  best  life  with  one  in 
which,  by  means  of  science,  art,  religious  contempla- 
tion, we  put  off  the  burden  of  our  mortality,  may  be 
inspiring  to  the  chosen  few,  but  to  the  plain  average 
man  these  are  noble  but  shadowy  ideas.  And  for 
what  is  shadowy  the  prosaic  Epicurus  has  no  taste. 
'  The  consecration  and  the  poet's  dream '  are  to  him 
80 


THE  SALVATION  OF  MAN 

empty  nothings.  '  I  call  men,'  he  writes  in  one  letter, 
'  to  continual  pleasures,  not  to  empty  and  idle  virtues 
which  have  but  a  confused  expectation  of  fruit'  (Fr. 
116);  and  in  another  place,  '  I  spit  on  the  noble  and 
its  idle  admirers,  when  it  contains  no  element  of 
pleasure'  (Fr.  512).  But  pleasure  and  pain  are  things 
we  all  know  by  immediate  experience,  and  what  could 
seem  a  simpler  basis  for  conduct  than  the  rule  that 
pleasure  is  good  and  pain  bad  ?  So  Epicurus  seeks 
once  more  to  bring  down  moral  philosophy  from 
heaven  to  earth  by  reverting  to  Hedonism.  The 
naturalness  of  the  view  that  pleasure  is  the  only 
ultimate  good,  says  Epicurus,  borrowing  an  argument 
from  Plato's  pupil  Eudoxus,  is  shown  by  the  spon- 
taneity with  which  all  animals  seek  it.  'His  proof 
that  pleasure  is  the  end  is  that  animals  delight  in  it 
from  their  birth  and  object  to  pain  spontaneously,  in- 
dependently of  any  process  of  education.'  Like  other 
Hedonists,  he  has  been  roundly  abused  for  degrading 
morality  by  his  doctrine,  but  some  of  the  abuse  at 
least  may  be  pronounced  undeserved.  When  we  con- 
sider how  many  philosophies  and  religions  have  done 
their  best  to  make  life  miserable  by  representing  the 
tormenting  of  ourselves  and  others  as  admirable  in 
itself,  we  may  feel  that  some  credit  is  owing  to  any 
man  who  is  not  afraid  to  maintain  that  happiness  is 
itself  a  good  thing,  and  that  to  be  happy  is  itself  a 
virtue.  And,  as  we  shall  see,  Epicurus  does  not  in 
the  least  mean  that  the  best  life  is  that  of  the 
F  81 


EPICURUS 

voluptuary.  He  taught  and  enforced  by  his  example 
the  doctrine  that  the  simple  life  of  plain  fare  and 
serious  contemplation  is  the  true  life  of  pleasure,  and 
in  the  main,  with  one  great  exception,  the  practical  code 
of  action  he  recommends  does  not  differ  much  from  that 
of  the  ordinary  decent  man.  The  main  objection  to 
his  Hedonism  is  a  theoretical  one ;  as  he  regards  the 
feeling  of  pleasure  as  the  only  good,  he  is  bound  to 
deny  that  virtue  or  beauty  has  any  moral  value  except 
as  a  necessary  means  to  pleasure,  and  thus  his  ethics, 
while  demanding  an  innocent  and  harmless  life,  can 
afford  no  inspiration  to  vigorous  pursuit  of  Truth  or 
Beauty,  or  strenuous  devotion  to  the  social  improve- 
ment of  man's  estate.  The  air  of  the  Garden  is  relax- 
ing ;  it  is  a  forest  of  Arden  where  nothing  more  is 
required  than  to  'fleet  the  time  carelessly.'  There  is 
a  touch  of  moral  invalidism  about  the  personality  of  a 
teacher  who  could  declare  that  'the  noble,  the  virtuous, 
and  the  like  should  be  prized  if  they  cause  pleasure ; 
if  they  do  not,  they  should  be  left  alone '  (Fr.  70).  To 
be  more  precise,  in  saying  that  pleasure  is  the  good, 
Epicurus  is  not  telling  us  anything  new.  Hedonism 
as  a  moral  theory  is  dealt  with  in  Plato's  Protagoras, 
had  been  advocated  by  Democritus,  and  expressly 
put  forward  within  the  Academy  itself  by  Eudoxus.1 
What  does  look  at  first  sight  more  original  is  the 

1  It  is  usual  at  this  point  to  bring  the  Cyrenaic  school  into 
the  story  as  precursors  of  the  Hedonism  of  Epicurus.     This  is, 
however,  historically  wrong.     The  ancients  do  not  appear  to 
82 


THE  SALVATION  OF  MAN 

way  in  which  Epicurus  conceives  of  the  highest  pleasure 
attainable  by  man.  He  holds  the  curious  view  that, 
though  pleasure  is  a  positive  thing  not  to  be  con- 
founded with  mere  absence  of  pain,  yet  the  moment 
pain  is  entirely  expelled  from  the  mind  and  body  we 
have  already  attained  the  maximum  degree  of  pleasure. 
Any  further  increase  in  the  pleasure-giving  stimulus, 
according  to  Epicurus,  can  only  make  pleasure  more 
variegated,  not  increase  its  intensity.  'The  (upper) 
limit  of  pleasures  in  magnitude  is  the  expulsion  of 
all  pain.  Where  pleasure  is  present,  and  so  long 
as  it  is  present,  pain  and  grief  are,  singly  and  con- 
jointly, non-existent'  (Catechism,  §  3).  'Pleasure 
receives  no  further  augmentation  in  the  flesh  after 
the  pain  of  want  has  once  been  expelled;  it  admits 
merely  of  variegation'  (ib.  18).  The  source  of  this 
pessimistic  estimate  of  the  possibilities  of  pleasure 
is  patent;  the  doctrine  comes  from  Plato's  Philebus. 
Plato  had  taught  that  the  satisfactions  of  appetite  are 

have  known  of  a  Cyrenaic  doctrine  before  the  time  of  the 
younger  Aristippus ;  and  in  Plutarch,  Adv,  Colotem,  we  find 
Arcesilaus  and  the  Cyrenaics  specifically  contrasted  with  Plato, 
Aristotle,  Stilpo,  and  Theophrastus  as  the  contemporaries  of 
Colotes.  This,  presumably,  like  most  of  the  statements  in 
Plutarch's  anti-Epicurean  essays,  goes  back  to  a  much  earlier 
Academic  source  (very  possibly  Carneades),  and  is  therefore 
not  likely  to  be  a  misapprehension.  The  earlier  philosophers 
who  have  influenced  Epicurus  in  his  theory  of  the  end  are 
demonstrably  Democritus  and  Eudoxus.  It  was  exactly  the 
same  blunder  in  chronology  which  long  led  scholars  to  suppose 
that  the  anti-Hedonist  polemic  of  Plato's  Philclm  was  aimed 
at  the  Cyronaics. 

83 


never  purely  pleasurable;    they  are  'mixed'  states, 
half-pleasurable,  half-painful.     They  depend  for  their 
pleasantness  upon  a  pre-existing  painful  state  of  want, 
and  the  process  of  satisfaction  only  continues  so  long  as 
the  pain  of  the  want  is  not  completely  assuaged,  but  still 
remains  in  the  total  experience  as  a  stimulus  to  go  on 
seeking   more  and    more    satisfaction.      The    '  true ' 
pleasures — i.e.  those  which  do  not  depend  for  their 
attractiveness  on  the  concealed  sting  of  unsatisfied  want 
— belong  to  the  mind,  not  to  the  body.     It  is  to  meet 
this  depreciation  of  the  everyday  pleasures  of  satisfy- 
ing bodily  appetite  that  Epicurus  declares  the  complete 
expulsion  of  pain  and  want  to  be  already  the  maximum 
attainable  degree  of  pleasure,  and  denies  the  existence 
of  the  '  mixed '  experiences.     The  alma  voluptas  of  his 
school  thus  comes  to  mean  a  life  of  permanent  bodily 
and  mental  tranquillity,  free  from  disquieting  sensa- 
tions and  from  the  anticipation  of  them — a  view  which 
he  has  merely  taken  over  from  Democritus,  who  spoke 
of  tvOvpia,  'cheerfulness  of  temper,'  as  the  true  end  of 
life.      What  he  has  done  is   simply  to   express   the 
Democritean  theory  in  a  terminology  specially  intended 
to  mark  dissent  from  the  Platonic  and  Aristotelian 
doctrine.     His  own  words  are :  '  The  end  of  all  our 
actions  is   to  be   free   from   pain  and  apprehension. 
When  once  this  happens  to  us,  the  tempest  in  the  soul 
becomes  a  calm,  and  the  organism  no  longer  needs  to 
make  progress  to  anything  which  it  lacks,  or  to  seek 
anything  further  to  complete  the  good  for  soul  and 
84 


THE   SALVATION   OF   MAN 

body.  For  we  only  need  pleasure  so  long  as  the 
absence  of  it  causes  pain.  As  soon  as  we  cease  to  be 
in  pain  we  have  no  need  of  further  pleasure.  This  is 
why  we  call  pleasure  the  beginning  and  end  of  the 
happy  life.  It  is  recognised  by  us  as  our  primal  and 
connatural  good,  and  is  the  original  source  of  all  choice 
and  avoidance,  and  we  revert  to  it  when  we  make 
feeling  the  universal  standard  of  good.  [Eudoxus.] 
Now  it  is  because  this  is  our  primal  and  connatural 
good  that  we  do  not  choose  to  have  every  pleasure, 
but  sometimes  pass  by  many  pleasures  when  a  greater 
inconvenience  follows  from  them,  and  prefer  many 
pains  to  pleasures  when  a  greater  pleasure  follows 
from  endurance  of  the  pain.  Every  pleasure  then  is  a 
good,  as  it  has  the  specific  character  of  the  good  [i.e. 
to  attract  us  for  its  own  sake],  but  not  every  pleasure 
is  to  be  chosen ;  so  also  every  pain  is  an  evil,  but  not 
every  pain  should  be  always  avoided '  (Ep.  iii.,  p.  62, 
Usener).  Hence  he  differs  from  his  Cyrenaic  contem- 
poraries, who  preached  a  robuster  type  of  Hedonism, 
in  three  points.  (1)  The  end  of  the  individual  action 
is  not  the  pleasure  of  the  moment,  but  a  permanent 
lifelong  condition  of  serene  happiness.  So,  unlike 
Aristippus,  he  does  not  accept  the  doctrine  of  taking 
no  thought  for  the  morrow,  but  says  'we  must 
remember  that  the  future  is  neither  wholly  our  own, 
nor  wholly  not  our  own,  that  we  may  neither  await  it 
as  certain  to  be,  nor  despair  of  it  as  certain  not  to  be' 
(Ep.  iii.,  Usener,  p.  62).  (2)  Epicurus  insists  strongly 
85 


EPICURUS 

that  pleasures  are  not  all  '  transitions '  from  one  con- 
dition to  another ;  besides  the  pleasures  of  transition 
there  are  Karao-T^/xaTiKou  r)8ovai,  pleasures  of  repose, 
a  point  which  had  already  been  made  by  Plato  and 
Aristotle.  He  says :  '  Freedom  from  mental  dis- 
quietude and  from  pain  are  pleasures  of  repose ;  joy 
and  delight  we  regard  as  activities  of  change '  (Fr.  2). 
Hence  he  is  often  wrongly  classed  among  those  who 
regard  mere  freedom  from  pain  as  the  highest  good. 
(3)  He  definitely  gives  the  preference  to  pleasures  of 
mind  over  pleasures  of  body,  arguing  that  '  in  bodily 
pain  the  flesh  is  tormented  merely  by  the  present,  but 
in  mental  pain  the  soul  is  distressed  on  account  of  the 
present,  the  past,  and  the  future.  Similarly  mental 
pleasures  are  greater  than  bodily'  (Fr.  452).  They 
are  greater,  that  is,  because  they  include  the  memory 
of  past  and  the  anticipation  of  future  happiness.  In- 
deed, Epicurus  carried  this  doctrine  to  the  point  of 
paradox,  saying  that  a  '  sage  '  would  be  happy  on  the 
rack,  since  his  pleasant  recollections  of  the  past  would 
outweigh  his  bodily  sufferings  (Fr.  601).  Later  writers 
like  Seneca  are  never  tired  of  making  merry  over  the 
Epicurean  '  sage '  who  must  be  able  to  say,  even  while 
he  is  being  roasted  alive,  '  How  delightful  this  is ! 
How  I  am  enjoying  myself ! '  Epicurus,  as  we  have 
seen,  illustrated  the  doctrine  practically  by  the  serenity 
of  his  last  painful  days.  But,  as  the  Academic  critics 
are  careful  to  remind  us,  we  must  recollect  that  all 
the  mental  pleasures  of  memory  and  anticipation,  to 
86 


THE   SALVATION  OF  MAN 

which  Epicurus  attributes  such  value,  are  resoluble 
into  the  recollection  or  anticipation  of  pleasurable  ex- 
periences which  are  themselves  analysable  into  sensa- 
tions, and  therefore  corporeal. 

As  we  should  expect,  Epicurus  is  never  tired  of 
denouncing  all  ascetic  views  about  the  pleasures  of 
bodily  appetite.  He  insists  ad  nauseam  that  man  has 
a  body  as  well  as  a  soul,  and  that  the  happy  life  is 
impossible  if  we  neglect  the  claims  of  the  body.  He 
and  his  friends  often  put  the  point  in  coarse  and 
vigorous  language,  which  scandalised  persons  of 
refined  turn  of  mind.  Metrodorus  said  in  a  letter  to 
his  brother  Timocrates,  'The  doctrine  of  nature  is 
wholly  concerned  with  the  belly '  (Fr.  39),  and 
Epicurus  that  'the  beginning  and  root  of  all  good 
is  the  pleasure  of  the  belly,  and  even  wisdom  and 
culture  depend  on  that'  (Fr.  67).  Metrodorus,  pro- 
bably using  a  formula  devised  by  his  master,  asks 
'what  else  is  the  good  of  the  soul  but  a  permanent 
healthy  condition  of  the  flesh,  and  a  confident  expecta- 
tion of  its  continuance  ? '  (Fr.  5),  a  definition  which  is 
a  perpetual  subject  for  denunciation  by  the  Academic 
critics.  The  real  meaning  of  sayings  like  these  is  more 
innocent  than  it  looks  to  be.  Epicurus  is,  after  all, 
only  saying  in  exaggerated  language,  that  even  a 
philosopher  cannot  afford  to  neglect  his  digestion. 
The  fact  that  both  he  and  Metrodorus  were  confirmed 
dyspeptics  goes  far  to  explain  the  vehemence  of  their 
language  about  the  '  pleasures  of  the  belly.'  Carlyle 

87 


EPICURUS 

might  easily  have  said  the  same  sort  of  thing,  and 
Dr.  Johnson,  who  was  far  from  being  a  voluptuary, 
actually  did. 

More  open  to  attack  was  Epicurus'  trick  of  abstract- 
ing from  the  whole  concrete  experience  of  the  satis- 
factions   of   virtuous  action,  and   asserting   that   the 
pleasure  which  accompanies  the  right  act  is  the  end 
to  which  the  act  itself  is  merely  a  means.     This  leads 
him  to  the   utilitarian  view  that  if  you  could   only 
escape   the   painful    consequences    which    attend    on 
indulgence   in   a    pleasant    vice,    the   vice  would  no 
longer  be  bad.     '  If  the  things  which  give  rise  to  the 
pleasures  of   the  profligate  could  deliver   our  under- 
standing from  its  fears  about  celestial   portents,  and 
death,  and  future  suffering,  and  could  also  teach  us  to 
limit  our  desires,   we  should  have  no  reason  left  to 
blame  them'    (§10   of   the    Catechism).      This   is,   of 
course,  a  conscious  contradiction  of  the  famous  Platonic 
doctrine,  that  to  have  a  bad  soul  is  itself  the  worst 
penalty   of  sin.     Epicurus,  however,  holds   that   this 
separation  of  vice  from  its  attendant  consequences  is 
not  actually  possible.     The  pleasures  of  sin  are  always 
attended  by  the  fear  of  detection   and   punishment, 
and  often  by  other  disagreeable   consequences.     Also 
they  cannot  teach  us  to  limit  our  desires,  and   thus 
escape  the  torment  of  unsatisfied  passion.      Nor  can 
they,  like  science,  dispel  the  fear  of  death  or  divine 
judgment.      This,  and  not   any  inherent   badness  in 
them,   is  why  they  must  not  be   admitted    into   our 
88 


lives.     The  true  conditions  of  a  happy  life  are  two  : 

(1)  the   assurance  that    all   consciousness    ends   with 
death,  and  that  God  takes  no  interest  in  our  doings ; 

(2)  the  reduction  of  our  desires  to  those  which  cannot 
be  suppressed  and  are  most  easily  satisfied ;  the  simple 
life.     Epicurus  accordingly  recognises  that   there  are 
three  classes  of  pleasures  :  (1)  those  which  are  natural 
and  necessary,  i.e.  those  which  come  from  the  satisfac- 
tion of  wants  inseparable  from  life,  such  as  the  pleasure 
of  drinking  when  thirsty  ;  (2)  those  which  are  natural 
but  not  necessary,  e.g.  the  pleasures  of  a  variegated 
diet,  which  merely  diversify  the   satisfaction  of   our 
natural  appetites ;  (3)  those  which  are  neither  neces- 
sary nor  natural,  but  created  by  human  vanity,  such 
as  the  pleasure  of  receiving  marks  of  popular  esteem, 
'crowns'  and   'garlands,' — as  we  might  say,  knight- 
hoods  and   illuminated   addresses.      The    wise    man 
despises  the  last  class,  he  needs  the  first,  the  second 
he  will  enjoy  on  occasion,  but  will  train  himself  to  be 
content  without  them.     (The  basis  of  this  classification 
is  Plato's  distinction,  in  the  Philebus,  between  'necessary ' 
and  '  unnecessary  '  bodily  pleasures.     The  sensualism 
of  Epicurus  compels  him  to  take  no  account  of  Plato's 
'  pure '  or  '  unmixed '  pleasures,  such  as  those  which 
arise  from   the  performance  of   noble   deeds,    or   the 
pursuit  of  beauty  and  truth  for  their  own  sakes.) 

Epicurus,  then,  looks  on  the  simple  diet  not  as  neces- 
sary in  itself  to  happiness,  but  as  useful  by  keeping 
us  from  feeling  the  lack  of  delicacies  which  cannot  be 
89 


EPICURUS 

procured.  '  We  regard  self-sufficiency  as  a  great  good, 
not  that  we  may  live  sparingly  in  all  circumstances,  but 
that  when  we  cannot  have  many  good  things  we  may 
be  content  with  the  few  we  have,  in  the  fixed  convic- 
tion that  those  who  feel  the  least  need  of  abundance 
get  the  greatest  enjoyment  out  of  it '  (Ep,  iii., 
Usener,  p.  63).  Thus  in  practice  the  Epicurean  ideal 
comes  to  be  satisfaction  with  the  simplest  necessaries 
of  life,  and  Epicurus  could  say  (Catechism,  §  15), 
'  natural  richos  are  limited  in  extent  and  easy  to  pro- 
cure, while  those  of  empty  fancy  are  indefinite  in  their 
compass ' ;  and  again  (Fr.  602),  '  give  me  plain  water 
and  a  loaf  of  barley-bread,  and  I  will  dispute  the  prize 
of  happiness  with  Zeus  himself.'  So  enemies  of  the 
theories  of  the  school  often  praise  its  practical 
counsels.  As  Seneca  says,  '  my  own  judgment,  how- 
ever distasteful  it  may  be  to  the  adherents  of  our  school 
[i.e.  the  Stoics],  is  that  the  rules  of  Epicurus  are  virtuous 
and  right,  and,  on  a  clear  view,  almost  austere ;  he 
reduces  pleasure  to  a  small  and  slender  compass,  and 
the  very  rule  AVC  prescribe  to  virtue  he  prescribes  to 
pleasure;  he  bids  it  follow  Nature.'  Even  of  the 
tortures  of  disease  he  holds  that  they  cannot  disturb 
true  happiness.  If  severe,  they  are  brief ;  if  prolonged, 
they  are  interrupted  by  intervals  of  relief. 

In  practice,  then,  though  not   in  theory,   Epicurus 

refuses  to  separate  pleasure  and  virtue.     '  You  cannot 

live  pleasantly  without  living  wisely  and  nobly  and 

justly,  nor  can  you  live  wisely  and  nobly  and  justly 

90 


THE   SALVATION  OF   MAN 

without  living  pleasantly.  Where  any  one  of  these 
conditions  is  absent  pleasurable  life  is  impossible' 
(Catechism,  §  5). 

In  respect  of  the  details  of  his  scheme  of  virtues, 
Epicurus  is  enough  of  a  true  Greek  to  give  the  first 
place  to  </>/)d  vqo- is,  wisdom,  reasonable  life.  'He  who 
says  that  it  is  not  yet  time  for  Philosophy,  or  that 
the  time  for  it  has  gone  by,  is  like  one  who  should  say 
that  the  season  for  happiness  has  not  yet  come,  or  is 
over.  So  Philosophy  should  be  followed  by  young 
and  old  alike  :  by  the  old  that  in  their  age  they  may 
still  be  young  in  good  things,  through  grateful 
memory  of  the  past ;  by  the  young  that  they  may  be 
old  in  their  youth  in  their  freedom  from  fear  of  the 
future  '  (Ep.  iii.,  Usener,  p.  59).  '  When  we  say  that 
pleasure  is  the  end,  we  do  not  mean  the  pleasures 
of  the  profligate,  nor  those  which  depend  on  sensual 
indulgence,  as  some  ignorant  or  malicious  misrepre- 
senters  suppose,  but  freedom  from  bodily  pain  and 
mental  unrest.  For  it  is  not  drinking  and  continual 
junketing,  nor  the  enjoyments  of  sex,  nor  of  the 
delicacies  of  the  table  which  make  life  happy,  but 
sober  reasoning  which  searches  into  the  grounds  of  all 
choice  and  avoidance,  and  banishes  the  beliefs  which, 
more  than  anything  else,  bring  disquiet  into  the  soul. 
And  of  all  this  the  foundation  and  chiefest  good  is 
wisdom.  Wisdom  is  even  more  precious  than  Philo- 
sophy herself;  and  is  the  mother  of  all  other  intel- 
lectual excellences '  (Ep.  iii.,  Usener,  p.  64). 

91 


EPICURUS 

Of  all  the  fruits  of  Philosophy  the  chief  is  the 
acquisition  of  true  friendship.  '  Of  all  that  Philosophy 
furnishes  towards  the  blessedness  of  our  whole  life 
far  the  greatest  thing  is  the  acquisition  of  friendship ' 
(Catechism,  §  27).  The  solitary  life  is  for  Epicurus, 
as  for  Aristotle,  no  life  for  a  man  who  means  to  be 
happy.  He  would  have  agreed  with  some  recent 
writers  that  the  highest  good  we  know  is  to  be  found 
in  personal  affection.  We  have  already  seen  how 
closely  analogous  the  Epicurean  organisation,  bound 
together  by  no  tie  but  the  personal  affection  of  its 
members,  was  to  the  early  Christian  Church,  in  which 
also  love  for  the  brethren  replaces  the  old  Hellenic 
devotion  to  the  '  city '  as  the  principle  of  social  unity. 
Hence  it  is  not  surprising  that  Epicurus,  like  Our  Lord, 
is  credited  with  the  saying  that  it  is  more  blessed  to 
give  than  to  receive.  In  his  attitude  towards  the 
State  Epicurus  naturally  represents  a  view  antithetic 
to  that  of  Plato  and  Aristotle,  who  insisted  upon 
common  service  to  the  '  city '  as  the  basis  of  all 
social  virtue.  Unlike  Aristotle,  who  teaches  that  man 
is  by  his  very  constitution  a  '  political  animal,'  a  being 
born  to  find  his  highest  good  in  the  common  life 
provided  by  the  community  into  which  he  comes 
at  birth,  Epicurus  revives  the  old  sophistic  distinc- 
tion between  the  '  natural '  and  the  '  conventional,' 
taking  the  purely  conventional  view  as  to  the  origin 
of  political  society  and  the  validity  of  its  laws. 
Societies  are  merely  institutions  created  by  compacts 
92 


THE  SALVATION  OF  MAN 

devised  by  men  to  secure  themselves  against  the  in- 
conveniences of  mutual  aggression.  '  Natural  justice,' 
he  says,  'is  an  agreement  based  on  common  interest 
neither  to  injure  nor  to  be  injured.'  '  Injustice  is  not 
an  evil  in  itself,  but  because  of  the  fear  caused  by 
uncertainty  whether  we  shall  escape  detection  by  the 
authorities  appointed  to  punish  such  things.'  'It  is 
impossible  for  one  who  has  secretly  done  something 
which  men  have  agreed  to  avoid,  with  a  view  to 
escaping  the  infliction  or  reception  of  hurt,  to  be  sure 
that  he  will  not  be  found  out  even  if  he  should  have 
gone  undetected  ten  thousand  times'  (Catechism, 
§§  31,  34,  35). 

Law,  then,  has  no  deeper  foundation  in  human 
nature  than  agreement  based  on  considerations  of 
utility.  It  is  only  when  such  an  agreement  has  been 
made  that  an  act  becomes  unjust.  Hence  Epicurus 
holds  that  brutes  have  no  rights  because,  from 
their  lack  of  language,  they  can  make  no  agreements 
with  one  another.  The  personal  friendship  of  the 
'  brethren '  is  a  thing  which  goes  infinitely  deeper  and 
is  more  firmly  rooted  in  the  bed-rock  of  human  nature, 
though  even  friendship  is  held  to  be  founded  in  the 
end  on  mere  utility.  Of  Plato's  conception  of  law  as 
the  expression  of  the  most  intimately  human,  and,  at 
the  same  time,  the  most  divine  element  in  our 
personality,  Epicurus  has  no  comprehension.  So 
though  his  doctrine,  as  preserved  in  the  Catechism, 
is  that  the  '  wise  man '  will  in  general  conform  to  the 

93 


EPICURUS 

laws,  since  some  of  them  are  obviously  based  on  sound 
utilitarian  considerations,  and  even  the  breaking  of 
those  that  are  not  is  likely  to  have  unpleasant  con- 
sequences, Epicurus  definitely  refuses  to  say  that  the 
wise  man  will  never  commit  a  crime.  His  words,  as 
reported  by  Plutarch,  are :  '  Will  the  wise  man  ever  do 
what  the  laws  forbid,  if  he  is  sure  not  to  be  found  out  1 
It  is  not  easy  to  give  an  unequivocal  answer  to  the 
question.'  Plutarch  interprets  this  to  mean,  'He 
will  commit  a  crime  if  it  brings  him  pleasure,  but  I 
do  not  like  to  say  so  openly.'  It  must  be  allowed 
that  on  Epicurus'  own  showing  his  '  wise  man '  would 
have  no  motive  for  refraining  from  a  pleasant  crime  if 
he  really  could  be  secure  of  impunity.  The  '  sage '  is 
not  a  person  whom  one  would  care  to  trust  with  the 
'  ring  of  Gyges.' 

It  was  a  consequence  as  much  of  the  age  as  of  the 
Epicurean  ideal  that  Epicurus  dissuaded  his  followers 
from  taking  part  in  public  life.  They  were  to  leave 
the  world  to  get  on  by  itself,  and  devote  themselves 
to  the  cultivation  of  their  own  peace  of  soul  by  plain 
living  and  anti-religious  reasoning.  This  separation 
of  personal  conduct  from  service  to  society  is  the 
point  on  which  the  Epicureans  lay  themselves  most  open 
to  attack  as  representing  an  ethics  of  selfishness  and 
indolence.  We  may  plead  in  palliation  that  their 
'quietism'  may  be  regarded  as  partly  a  necessary 
consequence  of  the  substitution  of  large  monarchies  for 
the  old  city-states.  In  such  monarchies,  even  when 

94 


THE  SALVATION   OF   MAN 

their  code  of  public  morality  does  not  keep  men  of 
sensitive  conscience  out  of  public  life,  it  is  inevitable 
that  the  direction  of  affairs  of  moment  shall  be  confined 
to  a  few  practised  hands.  Yet  it  must  also  be  re- 
membered that  not  a  few  philosophers,  Academics, 
Stoics  and  others  did  play  a  prominent  part  in  the 
public  affairs  of  the  age  without  soiling  their  garments. 
It  is  impossible  to  acquit  Epicurus  and  his  friends 
altogether  of  a  pitiable  lack  of  wholesome  public 
spirit.  It  was  only  reasonable  that  a  noble  temper 
like  that  of  Plutarch  should  be  outraged  by  the 
insults  they  heaped  on  the  memory  of  such  a  states- 
man and  patriot  as  Epameinondas  because  he  preferred 
wearing  himself  out  in  the  service  of  his  country  to 
taking  his  ease  at  home.  In  practice,  however,  as  the 
ancient  critics  observed,  the  apparently  contradictory 
maxims  of  Epicurus  and  Zeno  were  not  so  far  apart 
as  they  seem.  Epicurus  said  that  the  'sage'  should 
not  engage  in  politics  except  for  very  pressing  reasons  ; 
Zeno  that  he  should,  unless  there  were  special  reasons 
against  doing  so.  But  in  actual  life  an  Epicurean  with 
a  bent  for  politics,  or  a  Stoic  with  a  taste  for  retire- 
ment, could  always  find  that  the  reason  for  making  the 
exception  existed  in  his  own  case. 

By  following  the  rules  of  life  thus  laid  down  the 
Epicureans  hold  that  any  man,  without  need  of  special 
good  fortune  or  high  station  or  intellectual  gifts,  may 
learn  to  lead  a  life  which  is  free  from  serious  pain  of 
body  or  trouble  of  mind,  and  therefore  happy.  The 

95 


EPICURUS 

'sober  reasoning'  which  teaches  him  to  limit  his 
wants  to  the  necessities  of  life,  to  banish  fear  of  God 
from  his  mind,  to  recognise  that  death  is  no  evil,  and 
to  choose  always  the  course  of  action  which  promises  to 
be  most  fruitful  of  pleasure  and  least  productive  of 
pain,  will,  in  general,  leave  him  with  very  few  pains 
to  endure.  And  if  there  are  inevitable  hours  of 
suffering  to  be  gone  through,  and  if  death  is  the 
common  doom  of  all,  the  'wise  man'  will  fortify 
himself  in  his  times  of  suffering  and  on  his  deathbed 
by  dwelling  in  memory  on  the  many  pleasant  moments 
which  have  fallen  to  his  share.  Thus  prepared,  says 
Lucretius,  he  will  leave  the  feast  of  life,  when  his 
time  comes  to  go,  like  a  guest  who  has  eaten  his  full 
at  a  public  banquet,  and  makes  way  without  a  grumble 
for  later  comers ;  Metrodorus  adds,  that  he  will  not 
forget  to  say  '  grace  after  meat,'  and  thank  '  whatever 
gods  there  be '  that  he  has  lived  so  well  (Fr.  49). 


CHAPTER    IV 

EPICURUS  AND  HIS   CRITICS 

WE  have  already  had  a  glimpse  into  the  polemics 
waged  incessantly  by  Epicurus  and  his  friends  against 
the  adherents  of  all  views  but  their  own,  and  have 
made  aquaintance  with  some  of  the  '  Billingsgate ' 
employed  by  Epicurus  to  disparage  those  who  ventured 
to  differ  from  him  or  had  the  misfortune  to  have  taught 
him  something.  The  first  school  to  take  up  the  battle 
for  the  '  religious '  view  of  the  world  against  the  new 
secularism  of  Epicurus  was  the  Platonic  Academy. 
Their  polemic  against  the  '  Garden '  began,  as  we  shall 
see,  with  the  definitive  settlement  of  Epicurus  at 
Athens,  and  was  steadily  kept  up  until,  in  the  third 
and  fourth  centuries  after  Christ,  as  it  became  more 
and  more  clear  that  the  Christian  Church  was  putting 
itself  forward  as  a  rival  to  Philosophy,  the  various 
schools  became  gradually  merged  into  the  Neo- 
Platonism  which  represents  the  last  gallant  struggle  of 
Greek  culture  against  what  was  felt  as  largely  a  non- 
Hellenic  and  ominous  invasion  of  Orientalism.  We 
can  form  a  very  fair  conception  of  the  way  in  which 
the  controversy  was  carried  on  from  the  Academic 
G  97 


EPICURUS 

side,  if  we  compare  the  dialogue  Axiochus,  falsely  attri- 
buted to  Plato,  with  the  tone  of  the  Academic  anti- 
Epicurean  speakers  in  Cicero  (such  as  e.g.  Cicero 
himself  in  the  examination  of  the  Epicurean  ethics 
given  in  De  Finibus  Bk.  II.,  or  Gaius  Cotta  in  the  pole- 
mic of  De  Natura  Deorum,  against  their  theology),  and 
with  the  utterances  of  the  biting  essays  in  which 
Plutarch  has  set  himself  to  demolish  the  philosophical 
reputation  of  Colotes.  In  particular  the  very  close 
correspondence  between  Cicero  and  Plutarch,  often 
amounting  to  verbal  self-sameness,  shows  that  both  are 
following  the  same  Academic  source  (in  all  probability 
Cleitomachus,  the  pupil  who  preserved  for  later  genera- 
tions the  penetrating  inquiries  of  Carneades,  the  Hume 
of  the  ancient  world).  As  the  Axiochus  and  the  essays 
of  Plutarch  against  Colotes  are  much  less  widely  read 
than  the  De  Finibus  and  De  Natura  Devrum  of  Cicero, 
I  shall  probably  provide  the  more  entertainment  for 
the  reader  by  confining  my  concluding  remarks  chiefly 
to  the  former.  The  Axiochus  is  a  singularly  interesting 
specimen  of  a  third-century  '  Socratic  discourse.'  There 
can  be  no  doubt  about  the  date  at  which  it  was  written, 
since  it  expressly  alludes  to  the  Epicurean  argument 
that  death  is  no  evil,  because  it  is  mere  unconscious- 
ness, and  neither  good  nor  evil  is  possible  without 
consciousness,  as  the  '  superficial  talk '  which  is  for  the 
moment  popular  with  the  young,  and  its  language  is 
full  of  biting  sarcasms,  the  point  of  which  lies  in 
turning  specially  Epicurean  dicta  against  Epicurus 
98 


EPICURUS  AND   HIS  CRITICS 

himself.  Thus  the  date  of  the  little  work  cannot  be 
earlier  than  306  B.C. — the  year  of  Epicurus'  final  settle- 
ment in  Athens — and  cannot  again  be  much  later,  since 
as  Otto  Immisch,  the  one  recent  editor  of  the  dialogue 
and  the  first  student  to  recognise  its  real  purpose,  has 
pointed  out,  there  are  several  indications  in  the  con- 
versation that  Epicurus  had  not  yet  broken  with  his 
Democritean  teachers  or  with  the  pursuit  of  rhetoric 
so  completely  as  he  did  in  later  life.  The  dialogue  is 
thus  definitely  to  be  dated  at  about  forty  years  after 
the  death  of  Plato,  but  its  preservation  in  Platonic 
manuscripts  means,  of  course,  that  it  comes  from  the 
archives  of  the  Academy,  and  is  therefore  a  genuine 
Academic  composition.  At  the  time  to  which  we  must 
attribute  it  the  most  famous  members  of  the  School 
were  Polemon,  the  fourth  head  of  the  Academy,  Crates, 
Grantor,  and  Arcesilaus,  afterwards  famous  for  his 
brilliant  dialectical  criticism  of  Stoicism.  Of  its  author- 
ship we  have  no  precise  indication  beyond  the  fact  that 
the  writer  must  have  been  an  enthusiast  for  astronomy, 
and  writes  in  a  turgid  style  full  of  violent  metaphor  and 
poetical  reminiscences.  Immisch,  its  last  editor,  thinks 
of  Grantor,  whose  essay  on  Bereavement,  famous  in  later 
antiquity,  was  imitated  in  the  lost  Consolatio  addressed 
to  himself  by  Cicero,  on  the  death  of  his  daughter,  as 
well  as  in  the  extant  Consolatio  to  Apollonius  ascribed 
to  Plutarch.  But  the  identification,  as  Immisch  says, 
is  the  purest  guess.  Whoever  the  writer  may  have 
been,  it  is  interesting  to  observe  that  the  fashion  of 
99 


EPICURUS 

composing  '  discourses  of  Socrates '  was  still  current  in 
the  Platonic  school  a  century  after  Socrates'  death. 
That  the  dialogue  was  not  a  work  of  Plato  was  well- 
known  to  the  ancient  critics  who  included  it  with 
a  few  others  in  the  list  of  those  'universal!}' 
rejected.' 

The  plan  of  the  little  work  is  transparently  simple. 
Socrates  is  called  in  to  administer  spiritual  consolation 
to  his  old  friend  Axiochus,  who  has  just  been  attacked 
by  what  appears  to  be  a  kind  of  epileptic  fit,  and  is  in 
a  pitiable  condition  of  mental  weakness.  He  had 
formerly  been  in  the  habit  of  deriding  the  cowardice 
of  those  who  shrink  from  death,  but  now  that  he  is  face 
to  face  with  the  prospect  of  dissolution  his  courage  has 
oozed  out  of  him.  He  dreads  the  approaching  loss  of 
the  good  things  of  life,  and  shudders  at  the  thought  of 
worms  and  corruption  and  the  ugliness  of  the  fate 
which  awaits  his  body. 

Socrates  at  first  ironically  puts  on  the  mask  of  an 
Epicurean,  and,  in  language  which  is  filled  with 
Epicurean  terminology,  adroitly  employed  in  such 
a  way  as  to  insinuate  that  Epicurus  is  no  more 
than  a  charlatan  who  has  dressed  up  the  exploded 
theories  of  fifth-century  '  sophistry '  in  a  rhetorical  garb 
suited  to  the  taste  of  the  young  generation,  '  consoles ' 
Axiochus  by  the  usual  Epicurean  commonplaces. 
Death  is  utter  unconsciousness,  and  therefore  all 
suffering  ends  in  death;  it  is  'nothing  to  us,  because, 
so  long  as  we  are,  death  is  not,  and  when  death  has 
IOO 


EPICURUS  AND   HIS  CRITICS 

come,  we  are  not.'  These  well-meant  efforts  at  con- 
solation prove  a  failure;  as  Axiochus  says,  discourse 
of  this  kind  sounds  very  fine  while  you  are  well  and 
strong,  but  when  you  come  to  face  death  on  a  sick-bed, 
there  is  nothing  in  it  which  can  take  hold  of  the  heart. 
Socrates  then  suddenly  drops  the  mask,  and  appears 
as  a  convinced  Platonist.  He  dwells  on  the  blessed 
immortality  which  awaits  the  soul  after  its  release 
from  its  earthly  prison,  and  enforces  his  doctrine  in 
true  Socratic  style,  by  an  Orphic  myth,  setting  forth 
the  joys  of  heaven,  the  perpetual  banquet  (the 
'  marriage-supper  of  the  Lamb '),  the  angelic  harpings 
and  hallelujahs,  the  trees  bearing  all  manner  of  fruit, 
the  water  of  life,  the  unending  raptures  of  worship. 
Axiochus  finds  himself  not  merely  reconciled  to  his 
fate,  but  already  '  half  in  love '  with  death.  Thus  the 
main  object  of  the  author  is  to  urge  that  the  Epicureans 
can  provide  only  a  spurious  remedy  for  the  fear  of 
death ;  the  real  cure  for  it  is  to  be  sought  in  just  those 
beliefs  which  Epicurus  forbids  us  to  entertain,  faith  in 
God  as  the  righteous  judge  of  spirits,  and  in  the 
glorious  immortality  which  awaits  the  '  saints.'  One 
or  two  points  of  this  anti-Epicurean  polemic  call  for 
special  notice.  The  writer  makes  it  specially  clear 
that  one  of  his  chief  charges  against  Epicurus  is  his 
entire  want  of  originality,  thus  striking  a  note  which 
persists  throughout  the  whole  controversy  between  the 
two  schools  from  first  to  last.  Just  as  Cicero's  Academic 
speakers  insist  on  the  point  that  the  Physics  of  Epicurus 
IOI 


EPICURUS 

is  no  more  than  a  bad  echo  of  the  doctrine  of  Demo- 
critus,  the  writer  of  the  Axiochus  lays  special  emphasis 
on  the  assertion  that  the  famous  arguments  which 
were  to  banish  the  fear  of  death  are  mere  borrowings 
from  the  supposed  wisdom  of  Prodicus.  Indeed,  he 
goes  further  and  seems  to  insinuate  that  Epicurus  has 
borrowed  these  arguments  from  a  professed  pessimist 
without  seeing  that  they  are  inseparable  from  a  pessi- 
mistic theory  of  life  quite  incompatible  with  the 
Epicurean  views  as  to  the  happiness  of  the  'wise  man.' 
For  Axiochus  makes  a  remark  which  is  obviously  very 
pertinent,  but  to  which  the  Epicurean  theory  hardly 
admits  of  any  reply.  The  familiar  argument  about 
the  absurdity  of  thinking  that  any  evil  can  befall  us 
when  we  have  ceased  to  be  may  be  valid  enough. 
But  if  death  is  the  end  of  all,  we  may  reasonably  shrink 
from  it,  not  as  the  beginning  of  the  unknown,  but  as 
the  end  of  all  the  known  good  things  of  life.  Epicurus 
has  really  no  answer  to  this  but  to  reArile  the  greed  of 
those  who  make  such  complaints ;  but  Socrates  is 
ready  with  a  reply  which  he  professes  to  have  got,  like 
the  rest  of  his  wisdom,  from  the  discourses  of  Prodi- 
cus. It  is  not  true  that  death  is  the  end  of  the  good 
things  of  life,  because  life  is  actually  evil.  There  is 
no  age  of  man,  and  no  profession  or  calling,  in  which 
the  inevitable  pains  are  not  many  and  great,  while 
the  incidental  pleasures  are  few  and  fleeting.  Death 
therefore  should  be  doubly  welcome,  since  it  not  only 
sets  us  free  from  all  apprehensions  for  the  future,  but 

IO2 


EPICURUS  AND   HIS   CRITICS 

delivers  us  from  the  miseries  of  the  present.  The 
obvious,  and  as  it  seems  to  me,  the  correct  implication 
is  that  in  Epicurus  we  have  an  illogical  combination  of 
Hedonism  with  a  view  of  death  which  is  only  in  place  in 
the  mouth  of  a  professed  pessimist.  Equally  interesting 
is  another  point  to  which  Immisch  has  rightly  called 
attention.  In  the  '  Platonic '  discourse  of  Socrates  on 
the  hope  of  immortality  we  find,  besides  the  Orphic 
myth  of  judgment  and  Paradise,  great  stress  laid  on 
two  thoughts.  Man's  superiority  to  the  rest  of  the 
creation  and  his  destination  to  a  life  beyond  the  grave 
are  suggested  (1)  by  the  record  of  his  rise  from  bar- 
barism to  civilisation  and  (2)  by  his  success  in  reading 
the  secret  of  the  movements  of  the  heavenly  bodies. 
He  can  '  despise  the  violence  of  mighty  beasts,  make 
his  way  over  the  seas,  build  cities  to  dwell  in,  establish 
governments,  look  up  to  the  heavens,  behold  the 
circuits  of  the  stars  and  the  course  of  moon  and  sun,' 
etc.  All  this  he  could  never  have  done  '  if  there  were 
not  indeed  the  breath  of  God  in  his  soul.'  The  first 
part  of  this  argument  is  directed  against  the  Epicurean 
doctrine  of  human  progress  as  a  sort  of  unintentional 
by-product  of  an  accumulation  of  slight  advances  in 
the  adaptation  of  the  organism  to  its  environment,  each 
motivated  by  considerations  of  immediate  utility. 
Epicurus,  in  fact,  thought  of  man  as  merely  an 
animal  among  others,  endowed  with  an  inexplicable 
superiority  in  taking  advantage  of  favourable  varia- 
tions and  learning  by  his  past  mistakes.  '  We  must 
103 


EPICURUS 

suppose  that  Nature  herself  learns  and  is  constrained 
to  many  things  of  many  kinds  in  the  course  of  events 
themselves,  and  that  reflection  afterwards  takes  over 
what  is  thus  handed  down  to  it  by  Nature  and  puts  a 
further  finish  on  it,  and  makes  further  discoveries ' 
(Ep.  i.,  Usener,  p.  26-7,  with  which  we  may  compare 
the  account  of  human  progress  in  Lucretius,  v.  925 
and  what  follows).  The  Platonist  argument  against 
Epicurus,  which  is  identical  in  spirit  with  T.  H.  Green's 
argument  against  the  'naturalism'  of  Spencer  and 
Lewes,  is  that  this  very  tendency  to  progress  bears 
witness  to  a  '  divine '  or  '  spiritual '  principle  in 
man. 

The  argument  from  astronomy  (the  supreme  venera- 
tion for  this  science  is  a  genuine  Platonic  touch,  and 
comes  from  the  Laws  and  Epinomis)  is,  in  a  like  way, 
specially  aimed  at  the  characteristic  Epicurean  con- 
ception of  the  part  played  by  Physics  in  effecting  a 
happy  life.  The  whole  value  of  Physics  for  Epicurus 
lies  in  the  supposed  fact  that  it  expels  God's  Pro- 
vidence and  moral  government  from  the  universe,  just 
as  Nietzsche  has  said  that  the  great  service  of  Physics 
is  to  have  proved  the  non-existence  of  God.  The 
Platonist  rejoinder  is  that  Physics  is,  indeed,  entitled 
to  the  highest  honour,  but  for  the  very  opposite  reason, 
that  '  the  heavens  declare  the  glory  of  God/  and  the 
ability  to  read  their  lessons  testifies  to  the  presence  of 
the  'godlike'  in  human  nature.  Thus,  as  Immisch 
puts  it,  we  may  fairly  say  that  the  real  issue  at  stake 
104 


EPICURUS  AND  HIS  CRITICS 

in  the  controversy  of  the  Academy  with  Epicurus,  an 
issue  raised  in  the  Axiochus  and  never  afterwards  lost 
sight  of,  is  the  perennial  conflict  between  a  purely 
secular  and  a  religious  conception  of  the  world  and  our 
place  in  it.  Hence  it  is  not  surprising  that  the  main 
arguments  by  which  the  Platonists  support  their  views 
are  exactly  the  same  as  would  now  be  urged  by 
Christians  in  the  controversy  with  secularism.  Little 
has  changed  in  the  conflict  except  the  names  adopted 
by  the  contending  parties;  the  two  rival  interpreta- 
tions of  life  and  the  world  remain  in  principle  the 
same.  This  comes  out  most  clearly  of  all  in  the 
Essays  of  Plutarch  against  the  Epicurean  doctrine. 
We  have  already  seen  some  of  the  reasons  for  thinking 
that  the  basis  of  Plutarch's  attacks,  as  well  as  that  of 
Cicero's,  goes  back  as  far  as  Carneades,  the  great 
Academic  opponent  of  dogmatic  empiricism  in  the 
second  century  B.C.  But  there  are  at  least  two 
features  of  Plutarch's  work  which  seem  to  belong  to 
the  man  himself :  the  intense  warmth  of  personal 
religious  feeling,  and  the  local  Boeotian  patriotism 
which  pervade  it.  Plutarch's  chief  contribution  to 
the  controversy  consists  of  two  essays  more  specially 
directed  against  the  early  Epicurean  Colotes.  Of  the 
man  himself  we  know  little  more  than  a  single  anecdote 
which  is  a  source  of  standing  delight  to  the  ancient 
critics  of  the  '  mutual  admirationism '  of  the  Epicurean 
coterie.  He  joined  the  school  in  its  early  days  at 
Lampsacus,  and  signalised  his  '  conversion '  by  publicly 
105 


EPICURUS 

venerating '  Epicurus  as  a  god  at  the  end  of  one  of 
his  discourses  on  Physics.  Epicurus  returned  the 
compliment  by  'venerating'  Colotes  and  calling  him 
'  immortal.'  This  may  have  been  meant  as  a  piece  of 
good-natured  satire  on  the  extravagance  of  Colotes, 
but  the  Academic  writers  prefer  to  take  the  per- 
formance more  seriously,  and  make  merry  over  the 
disappointment  of  Colotes  at  finding  himself  promoted 
only  to  the  rank  of  a  'hero.'  Colotes  wrote  a  work 
with  the  title  '  That  life  itself  is  an  impossibility  on 
the  principles  of  the  other  philosophers,'  in  which  he 
caricatured  and  abused  impartially  all  philosophies 
except  that  of  Epicurus.  Plutarch's  two  essays  take 
the  form  of  an  examination  and  refutation  of  this  work. 

The  essay  'against  Colotes,'  which  is  largely  con- 
cerned with  Colotes'  attack  on  the  distinctive  tenets 
of  the  rival  schools,  need  receive  no  attention  here. 
The  other  essay,  which  exhibits  the  Academic  criticism 
of  Epicurean  ethics  at  its  best,  bears  a  title  happily 
parodied  from  that  of  the  book  of  Colotes  itself,  '  That 
happy  life  is  impossible  on  the  principles  of  Epicurus  ' ; 
the  very  suggestion  which  had  already  been  made  in 
the  Axioclius.  I  propose  to  conclude  this  short  account 
with  a  very  brief  summary  of  this  acute  and  penetrating 
attack  on  secularistic  Hedonism. 

The  author  begins  by  defining  the  precise  position 

he  intends  to  sustain.     All  questions  about  the  moral 

value  of  the  Epicurean  life  are,  for  the  time,  to  be 

set  aside;   the  case  for  or  against  Epicurus  is  to  be 

1 06 


EPICURUS  AND  HIS   CRITICS 

argued  on  strictly  Hedonist  lines.  He  and  Colotes 
profess  to  regard  pleasure  as  the  good.  We  will  not, 
in  the  first  instance,  ask  whether  this  is  or  is  not  a 
satisfactory  theory.  Our  question  is  whether,  admit- 
ting pleasure  to  be  the  good,  the  Epicurean  life  affords 
the  best  way  to  secure  the  most  of  it.  It  is  then 
argued  (a)  that  the  doctors  of  the  sect  expressly  hold 
that  the  primary  sources  of  pleasure  and  pain  are 
bodily.  It  is  on  the  pleasures  and  pains  of  the  body 
that  the  whole  superstructure  of  the  mental  happiness 
of  memory  and  anticipation  is  based.  As  to  this  we 
may  remark  that  bodily  pleasures  are  dependent  on 
the  activity  of  a  few  specialised  organs ;  pain,  and  that 
in  the  most  cruel  forms,  may  attack  any  and  every  part 
of  the  body.  Bodily  pleasures,  again,  are  brief  thrills 
which  come  and  go  like  meteors ;  bodily  pain,  set  up 
in  one  part,  may  spread  itself  to  others  and  so  come 
to  persist  for  seasons  and  even  years  together.  As  far 
as  the  body  is  concerned,  it  must  be  pronounced  that 
its  pleasures  are  as  nothing  to  the  pains  to  which  it  is 
exposed.  But  (b)  the  Epicureans  themselves  profess 
that  purely  bodily  pleasures  do  not  count  for  much ; 
they  rest  their  case  on  the  pleasures  of  the  mind, 
which,  they  say,  can  persist  under  the  direst  bodily 
tortures.  Now  on  this  we  may  remark  that  if  bodily 
pain  is  as  trifling  a  thing  as  Epicurus  often  declares  it 
to  be,  and  if  also,  as  he  asserts,  you  at  once  enjoy  the 
maximum  possible  pleasure  the  moment  you  cease  to 
be  in  pain,  the  pleasures  which  reach  their  highest 
107 


EPICURUS 

intensity  as  soon  as  pain  is  expelled  must  also  be 
very  petty  things.  But  we  may  meet  them  with  an 
argument  which  goes  much  more  deeply  into  the 
psychology  of  the  School.  According  to  their  own 
doctrine,  the  contents  of  the  mind  are  mere  paler 
after-effects  of  actual  sensation.  Memory-images  are 
washed-out  and  blunted  sensations,  and  we  may  liken 
the  pleasure  which  they  awaken,  in  comparison  with 
the  pleasure  accompanying  actual  sensation,  to  the 
scent  left  behind  in  an  emptied  wine-bottle.  A  '  wise 
man'  who  tries  to  make  himself  happy  by  imagina- 
tively dwelling  on  the  details  of  past  sensual  enjoy- 
ments is  like  a  man  who  tries  to  banquet  on  the 
stale  remains  of  yesterday's  feast.  Epicurus,  in  fact, 
plays  a  game  of  'hanky-panky'  with  his  disciples. 
He  tells  you  that  the  pleasures  which  are  to  outweigh 
all  the  pains  of  life  are  those  of  the  soul ;  but  when  you 
ask  what  are  the  pleasures  of  the  soul  they  turn  out  to  be 
only  a  feebler  mental  survival  of  those  of  the  body.  Now 
our  bodily  frame  is  so  much  the  sport  of  circumstance  and 
accident  that  its  '  servility  to  all  the  skiey  influences '  is 
a  commonplace  of  literature,  and  this  simple  fact  makes 
nonsense  of  the  identification  of  the  good  with  'an 
equilibrium  of  the  flesh  conjoined  with  a  confident 
anticipation  of  its  continuance.'  The  'equilibrium'  is, 
in  the  first  place,  difficult  of  establishment  and  brief 
in  duration,  and,  in  the  second  place,  its  continuance, 
in  a  world  fraught  with  such  dangers  as  ours,  can 
never  be  counted  on.  Thus  the  ideal  of  Epicurus  and 
108 


EPICURUS  AND   HIS   CRITICS 

Metrodorus  is  that  of  fools.  Mere  freedom  from  pain 
and  anxiety  is  not  the  good,  but  merely  the  '  necessary,' 
an  indispensable  condition  of  the  attainment  of  some- 
thing better,  but  of  no  value  in  itself,  (c)  And  not 
only  is  the  Epicurean  good  notoriously  unobtainable, 
but  it  carefully  omits  all  those  pleasures  which  decent 
men  judge  to  be  the  worthiest.  Their  account  of  the 
mental  pleasures  leaves  no  room  for  any  except  those 
which  accompany,  or  are  fainter  reinstatements  of,  a 
somatic  'thrill.'  Hence  they  cannot  recognise  (1)  the 
pleasures  of  literature  and  science  (in  fact  Epicurus 
notoriously  tried  to  keep  his  young  friends  from 
devoting  themselves  to  either),  (2)  nor  those  which 
accompany  a  life  well-spent  in  the  service  of  the 
community.  In  fact,  though  they  use  the  most 
extravagant  language  about  the  superhuman  virtue 
of  an  Epicurean  who  has  rendered  some  very  trifling 
service  to  a  friend,  they  have  nothing  but  raillery  and 
abuse  for  the  lives  of  the  great  statesmen  and  soldiers 
who  have  been  the  common  benefactors  of  civilisation. 
In  a  word,  they  leave  out  of  their  computation  of 
pleasures  all  those  which  make  life  worth  living  to 
any  one  but  a  moral  invalid. 

The  argument  next  proceeds  to  examine  the  claim 
of  Epicurus  to  have  made  life  infinitely  more  pleasurable 
by  freeing  mankind  from  the  fear  of  God  and  the 
dread  of  hell.  Plutarch  goes  on  to  give  a  very  in- 
teresting account  of  the  effects  of  religious  convictions 
on  human  happiness,  which  ought  to  be  carefully 
109 


EPICURUS 

pondered  before  we  make  any  assertion  on  the  vexed 
question  how  far  ancient  Greek  life  was  really  over- 
shadowed, as  Epicurus  and  Lucretius  assume  it  to  have 
been,  by  terrors  of  this  kind.  His  view  is  that 
Epicurus  has  absurdly  overrated  the  extent  to  which 
theological  beliefs  cause  unhappincss.  That  they  do 
so  sometimes  he  allows,  but  urges  that  they  give  rise 
to  an  overwhelmingly  greater  amount  of  happiness. 
We  may  divide  mankind,  he  says,  into  three  classes. 
(1)  There  is  the  small  'criminal'  class.  Their  belief 
in  God  and  the  future  must,  no  doubt,  give  rise  to 
fear,  pure  and  simple.  But  it  is  well  that  they  should 
be  thus  afraid,  not  merely  on  the  ground  of  public 
safety,  but  because,  so  far  as  their  fear  of  God's 
judgments  restrains  them  from  actually  committing 
projected  crime,  it  makes  them  better  men  by  saving 
them  from  guilt.  Epicurus  would  be  doing  a  very 
bad  service  even  to  the  habitual  criminal  himself,  if  he 
could  persuade  him  that  the  '  last  things '  are  mere 
fables.  (2)  There  is  the  very  large  class  of  mostly 
decent,  but  philosophically  uninstructed  persons.  With 
them  the  thought  of  God  is  tempered  with  fear  (they 
show  this  by  that  scrupulous  anxiety  to  discharge  the 
ceremonial  obligations  of  religion  which  the  Greeks 
called  deisidaimonia),  but  fear  is  not  the  dominant 
note.  Their  belief  in  God  as  the  giver  of  all  good  is 
merely  qualified  by  an  undertone  of  salutary  fear. 
Attendance  on  the  ceremonies  of  worship  is  in  the 
main  a  source  of  pleasure  to  them,  because  they  feel 
1 10 


themselves  in  the  presence  of  wise  and  kindly  powers. 
Even  to  the  day-labourer  and  the  drudge  religion  is 
a  boon  with  its  holidays  and  feast-days.  And  the 
rich,  who  can  fare  sumptuously  every  day,  are  happiest 
of  all  when  they  celebrate  the  feasts  of  religion,  not 
because  they  are  faring  better  than  usual,  but  because 
they  feel  the  presence  of  God.  A  man  who  denies 
Providence  cuts  himself  off  from  all  this  happiness. 
He  may  share  in  the  ritual,  but  it  can  give  no  joy  to 
him,  since  he  looks  on  it  all  the  while  as  a  mummery. 
(3)  Finally  there  are  the  few  '  philosophers '  who  have 
really  enlightened  views  about  God  and  the  relation 
of  God  to  man.  To  them  religion  is  a  source  of 
unalloyed  delight ;  there  is  no  trace  of  fear  in  their 
feelings  towards  God,  since  they  know  Him  to  be 
perfectly  good,  and  the  author  of  nothing  but  good, 
the  '  giver  of  all  good  things '  (Zeus  Epidotes),  '  the 
God  of  all  consolation '  (Zeus  Meilichios),  the  '  defender 
of  all  that  put  their  trust  in  Him '  (Alexikakos). 
'  All  things  are  God's,  and  they  are  the  friends  of  God, 
and  therefore  all  things  are  theirs.'  Epicurus'  treat- 
ment of  immortality  receives  a  similar  criticism.  The 
fear  of  hell  is  positively  good  for  the  criminal  class. 
As  for  the  mass  of  decent  men,  when  they  think  of 
the  life  to  come,  they  feel  no  fear  of  'bogies'  who 
have  often  been  paraded  on  the  comic  stage  for  their 
amusement.  Immortality  is  a  thought  which  fills 
them  with  happiness ;  it  offers  a  satisfaction  for  the 
1  longing  to  go  on  living '  which  is  natural  to  us  all ; 
in 


EPICURUS 

or  if  the  ordinary  man  is,  now  and  then,  disconcerted 
by  the  old  wives'  tales,  there  are  cheap  and  innocent 
religious  rites  which  will  restore  his  equanimity. 
What  he  really  does  shrink  from  is  the  very  prospect 
which  Epicurus  holds  out  as  the  greatest  boon, 
annihilation.  To  be  always  harping  on  the  thought 
that  '  we  have  been  born  as  men  once ;  there  is  no 
second  birth,  and  we  shall  never  be  again  to  all  eternity ' 
is  to  'die  many  times  before  our  death.'  As  for  the 
real  children  of  God,  immortality  means  for  them  the 
'  prize '  of  their  calling,  the  beholding  of  the  beatific 
vision  face  to  face,  and  the  reunion  with  their  loved 
ones  who  have  gone  before.  Even  descending  from  this 
high  strain,  we  may  say  that  the  belief  that  death  is 
the  gateway  to  a  better  life  adds  to  the  joys  of  the 
fortunate  and  consoles  the  unfortunate  by  the  thought 
that  their  ill-luck  here  is  no  more  than  a  troublesome 
accident  on  a  journey  which  has  home  for  its  goal. 
On  the  Epicurean  view,  death  is  an  evil  to  fortunate 
and  unfortunate  alike ;  it  is  the  end  of  the  good  things 
of  life  to  the  one  class,  the  end  of  all  hope  of  a  change 
for  the  better  to  the  other.  The  wisdom  of  Epicurus 
is  thus  the  merest  foolishness.  At  best  it  enables  a 
man  with  difficulty  to  argue  himself  into  a  state  into 
which  a  brute  is  born.  It  is  better  to  be  a  pig  than 
an  Epicurean  philosopher,  for  the  pig  neither  takes 
thought  for  the  morrow  nor  fears  God  nor  distresses 
himself  about  death  and  what  comes  after  death ;  and 
as  for  the  'equilibrium  of  the  flesh,'  it  is  as  much  his, 
112 


EPICURUS  AND   HIS  CRITICS 

if  he  is  a  fairly  healthy  pig,  as  the  philosopher's.  And 
what  better  good  does  the  Epicurean  buy  at  the 
price  of  his  everlasting  poring  over  his  master's 
precepts  ? 

If  human  nature  is  much  the  same  in  all  ages,  one 
would  suppose  that  Plutarch's  account  of  the  attitude 
of  mankind  to  Theism  and  Immortality  in  the  ancient 
world  is  much  nearer  the  truth  than  that  of  Epicurus. 
One  might  almost  fancy  that  when  he  'went  round 
with  his  mother,  reading  spells  for  her,'  he  had  imbibed 
childish  terrors  from  which  he  had  never  been  able  to 
shake  himself  free.  The  pathological  character  of 
Lucretius'  horrors  of  the  world  to  come  is  sufficiently 
marked  for  us  by  the  intensity  of  imagination  with 
which  he  depicts  them.  Yet  there  were,  in  later  ages, 
men  who  seem,  without  the  need  of  salvation  from 
such  morbid  fears,  to  have  found  real  consolation  in 
this  uninspiring  theology.  Lucian  seems  to  speak 
from  his  heart  when  he  says  with  reference  to  the 
burning  of  Epicurus'  Catechism  by  the  impostor 
Alexander,  '  How  little  the  wretch  knew  how  great 
good  that  little  book  does  to  those  who  fall  in  with  it, 
what  peace,  what  calm,  what  freedom  of  soul  it  effects 
in  them ;  how  it  rids  them  of  terrors  and  hobgoblins 
and  bugbears,  and  extravagant  and  idle  fancies ;  how 
it  fills  them  with  truth  and  reason,  and  purifies  their 
judgments  in  very  deed,  not  by  torches  and  squills  or 
any  such  impostures,  but  by  sound  discourse,  and 
truth,  and  frank  speaking.'  Even  more  touching  is 
H  113 


EPICURUS 

the  summary  of  Epicurean  teaching  which  Diogenes 
of  Oenoanda  in  Pisidia,  a  schoolmaster  of  the  early 
Imperial  time,  inscribed  on  the  walls  of  the  little  town 
in  order  that  the  words  which  had  brought  peace  and 
happiness  into  his  own  life  might  remain  after  his 
death  for  the  spiritual  benefit  of  his  townsmen  and  of 
any  chance  visitors  whose  eyes  they  might  catch. 


114 


APPENDIX 

SELECT  APOPHTHEGMS  FROM  EPICURUS  AND 
METRODORUS 

If  you  would  make  Pythocles  rich,  seek  not  to  add 
to  his  possessions  but  to  take  away  from  his  desires. 
(Epicurus  to  Idomeneus,  Us.,  Fr.  135.) 

You  must  be  the  slave  of  Philosophy  if  you  would 
attain  true  freedom.  (Seneca,  Ep.  Men:,  8.  7.) 

If  you  make  nature  the  rule  of  your  life,  you  will 
never  be  poor,  if  current  opinion,  you  will  never  be 
rich.  (Ib.,  16.  7.) 

He  who  follows  nature  and  not  empty  opinions  is 
content  in  any  estate,  for,  measured  by  the  standard 
of  what  is  enough  for  nature,  any  property  is  wealth  ; 
but  measuring  by  our  unlimited  appetites,  even  the 
greatest  wealth  is  poverty.  (Us.,  Fr.  202.) 

We  have  been  born  once ;  there  is  no  second  birth. 
For  all  time  to  come  we  shall  not  be  at  all.  Yet, 
though  you  have  no  power  over  the  morrow,  you  put 


EPICURUS 

off  the  season  [i.e.  for  acquiring  Philosophy].  It  is 
this  procrastination  that  ruins  the  life  of  us  all ;  thanks 
to  it  each  of  us  dies  without  tasting  true  leisure. 
(Us.,  Fr.  204.) 

In  all  things  act  as  though  the  eye  of  Epicurus  were 
on  you.  (Seneca,  Ep.  Mor.  25.  5.) 

Severe  pain  soon  makes  an  end  of  us,  protracted 
pain  has  no  severity.  (Us.,  Fr.  447.) 

Let  us  give  thanks  to  our  lady  Nature  that  she  has 
made  things  needful  easy  to  procure,  and  things  hard 
to  procure  needless.  (Ib.,  Fr.  468.) 

He  who  least  craves  for  the  morrow  will  go  to  meet 
it  most  happily.  (Ib.,  Fr.  490.) 

Laws  are  made  for  the  sake  of  the  wise,  not  to 
prevent  them  from  inflicting  wrong  but  to  save  them 
from  suffering  it.  (Ib.,  Fr.  530.) 

We  can  provide  ourselves  with  defences  against  all 
things  but  death ;  where  death  is  concerned,  all  man- 
kind are  dwellers  in  an  unfortified  city.  (Metrodorus, 
Fr.  51.  The  saying  is  also  ascribed  to  Epicurus.) 

We  should  not  esteem  a  grey-beard  happy  because 
he  dies  in  advanced  age,  but  because  he  has  had  his 
116 


APPENDIX 

fill  of  good  things ;  in  respect  of  time,  we  are  all  cut 
off  in  our  flower.     (Metrodorus,  Fr.  52.) 

There  are  some  who  spend  a  life-time  in  preparing 
to  live,  as  though  they  were  to  have  a  second  life 
after  what  we  call  'life.'  They  do  not  see  that  the 
draught  of  birth  poured  out  for  each  of  us  is  a  deadly 
poison.  (Ib.,  Fr.  53.  The  first  sentence  is  also  attributed 
to  Antiphon  the  Sophist.  Metrodorus  must  have  the 
merit  of  the  piquant  metaphor.) 

Only  the  'wise  man'  knows  how  to  show  himself 
grateful.  (Ib.,  Fr.  54  ;  from  Seneca,  Ep.  Mm:  81.  11.) 

He  who  wastes  his  youth  on  high  feeding,  on  wine, 
on  women,  forgets  that  he  is  like  a  man  who  wears  out 
his  overcoat  in  the  summer.  (Ib.,  Fr.  55.) 

If  we  do  not  repay  the  loan  of  life  quickly,  Nature 
comes  down  on  us  like  a  petty  Shylock  and  takes 
eyesight  or  hearing,  or  often  enough  both,  as  pledges 
for  the  settlement.  ([Plato]  Axiochus,  367  B  ;  clearly 
another  of  the  picturesque  Epicurean  metaphors.) 

Cheerfulness  on  a  couch  of  straw  is  better  than  a 
golden  couch  and  a  sumptuous  table,  and  disquiet  of 
mind  therewithal.  (Epicurus,  Fr.  207.) 

Retire  most  of  all  into  thyself  when  thou  art  forced 
to  be  in  a  crowd.     (Ib.,  Fr.  208.) 
117 


EPICURUS 

Nothing  novel  can  happen  in  a  universe  which  has 
already  existed  through  infinite  time.  (Epicurus,  Fr. 
266.) 

If  God  heard  men's  prayers,  mankind  would  have 
perished  long  ago,  for  they  are  ever  invoking  cruel 
curses  on  one  another.  (Ib.,  Fr.  388.) 


118 


A  CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE  USEFUL  TO 
THE  READER  OF  THIS  BOOK 

B.C. 

Plato  dies,  and  is  succeeded  by  Speusippus,  .  347 

Epicurus  born  in  Samos,  7th  Gamelion,  .  .  341 

Speusippus  succeeded  by  Xenocrates,  .  .  339 

Aristotle  opens  his  School  in  Athens,  .  .  335 

Stilpo  of  Megara  '  flourishes,'  .  .  c .  330 
Death  of  Aristotle  at  Chalcis  ;  Theophrastus  head 

of  the  Lyceum,  .....  322 

Expulsion  of  Athenian  settlers  from  Samos,  .  322 

Timon  the  Sillographer  born,  .  .  .  315 

Xenocrates  dies  ;  Polemo  head  of  Academy,  .  314 
Epicurus  collects  disciples  at  Mytilene  and 

Lampsacus,  .  .  .  .  c.  310 

Epicurus  established  at  Athens  .  .  .  306-5 

Stoic  School  founded  by  Zeno  of  Cittium,  .  .  c.  300 

Theophrastus  dies  ;  Strato  head  of  Lyceum,  .  287 
Metrodorus  dies  (Arcesilaus  head  of  Academy 

about  this  time),  .....  276 

Epicurus  dies,  .....  270 

Antigonus  of  Carystus  '  flourishes,'  .  .  .  c.  250  (?) 

Carneades  born,  .  .  .  .  .  213 

Sotion  of  Alexandria  writes  his  '  Successions,'  .  c.  200 

Chronica,  of  Apollodorus  first  published,  .  .  144 

Carneades  dies,  .  .  .  .  .  129 


B.C. 

Lucretius  born,         ...  99 
Cicero  attends  the  Lectures  of  Phaedrus  at  the  age 

of  nineteen, 

Cicero  hears  Phaedrus  and  Zeno  of  Sidon  at  Athene,  79 

Death  of  Lucretius,  ...  55 

Philodemus  at  Rome,            .            .  c.  52 

(Date  of  Cicero's  attack  on  Piso) 

Cicero  writes  the  De  Finibus,          .                        .  45 

Cicero  writes  De  Natura  Deorum,  .  44 

A.D. 

Seneca  writes  his  Epistitlae  Morales,  59-65 

Plutarch  '  flourishes,'             .             .  68-125 

Lucian '  flourishes,'  ...                        .  c.  160 

Sextus  Empiricus  '  flourishes,'          .                        •  c.  200 

Inscription  of  Diogenes  of  Oenoanda,           .             .  c.  200 

or  a  few  years  earlier. 


1 2O 


A  SHOET  LIST  OF  BOOKS  USEFUL  TO  THE 
ENGLISH  STUDENT  OF  EPICUEUS 

[Works  on  Ancient  Philosophy  or  on  Ancient  Atomism  in 
general  are  excluded,  as  are  also  works  dealing  specially  with 
the  exposition  of  Lucretius.] 

I.  Sources.  Epicurea ;  edidit  Hermannus  Usener.  Leipzig, 
Teubner,  1887.  (Anastatic  reprint,  1903.)  A  complete 
critical  text  of  all  the  remains  of  Epicurus  known  up  to 
1887,  with  (Latin)  Prolegomena  on  their  authenticity,  the 
form  in  which  the  Epicurean  correspondence  circulated 
in  antiquity,  etc.  Indispensable  to  serious  study. 

Metrodori  Epicurei  Fragmenta.  Edited  by  A.  Koerte. 
Leipzig,  Teubner,  1890. 

L/iicrdius  de  Rerum  Natura.  Text,  translation,  and  com- 
mentary. H.  A.  J.  Munro.  Fourth  edition.  Cambridge. 
Deighton,  Bell  &  Co.,  1893.  (Translation  obtainable 
separately,  as  a  volume  of  Routledge's  New  Universal 
Library.) 

Diogenes  of  Oenoanda.  Ed.  J.  William.  Leipzig,  B.  G. 
Teubner,  1907. 

PLUTARCH.  The  Essays  against  Colotes  will  be  found  in 
vol.  6  of  Plutarchi  Moralia.  Ed.  G.  N.  Bernardakis. 
Leipzig.  B.  G.  Teubner,  1888-1896. 

CICERO.  De  Finibus  Bonorum  et  Malorum.  Ed.  Madvig, 
Copenhagen,  1869  (2nd  ed.). 

De  Natura  Deorum.  Ed.  J.  B.  Mayor.  3  vols.  Cam- 
bridge, 1880. 

I  121 


EPICURUS 

PHILODEMUS.  Bhetorica.  (2  vols.  with  supplement.)  Ed. 
S.  Sudhaus.  Leipzig,  Teubner. 

II.  WALLACE,  WILLIAM.  Epicureanism.  London,  Society 
for  Promoting  Christian  Knowledge,  1880.  (A  specially 
fascinating  introduction  to  the  study  of  the  Epicurean 
doctrine  and  its  fortunes.) 

HICKS,  R.  D.  Stoic  and  Epicurean.  New  York,  1910. 
Charles  Scribner's  Sons.  (A  volume  in  the  recently  pro- 
jected series,  Epochs  of  Philosophy,  edited  by  J.  G-. 
Hibben.) 

GUYAU,  JUAN  MARIE.     La  Morale  dy Epicure.     Paris,  1878. 

And  as  a  standard  work  for  reference, 

ZELLER,  E.  The  Stoics,  Epicureans  and  Sceptics.  Trans- 
lated (from  the  author's  great  work  Die  Philosophie  der 
Grriechen)  by  0.  J.  Reichel.  London,  Longmans,  Green 
&  Co.  (The  latest  edition  of  the  relevant  part  of  the 
original  German  work  is  Philosophie  der  Griechen,  iii.  1. 
4th  edition.  Leipzig,  1909.) 

See  also  the  fuller  Bibliography  in  the  work  of  R.  D.  Hicks, 
mentioned  above. 


Printed  by  T.  and  A.  CONSTABLE,  Printers  to  His  Majesty 
at  the  Edinburgh  University  Press 


"'••'•I  Mill  Hill       ||      ||     I      I     UN 

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